Rating scales invite people to answer the way they think an employer wants. Edwin and Claire dig into why OAD has people pick words instead, the decades of factor analysis behind those words, and why continuous scores beat sorting people into four-letter types.
Welcome back to Science of Leading. Last episode we talked about the gap between traits and perceived job behavior. Today I want to go one layer deeper, into why OAD even uses this adjective selection format in the first place, instead of the rating scales most personality tests use.
Because rating scales have a built in flaw. The moment you ask someone to rate how strongly they agree with a statement like "I stay calm under pressure," you've invited them to answer the way they think the employer wants to hear. That's social desirability bias, and it's not a minor rounding error, it can meaningfully distort a hiring decision.
Whereas picking words from a list feels lower stakes, there's no obvious "right" adjective to reach for.
Exactly, you scan a hundred and ten words and select the ones that honestly describe you, there's no statement to strategically agree or disagree with. And that word list isn't arbitrary. It's been refined through psychometric item analysis specifically to strip out vague or trendy adjectives that just add noise without adding signal.
And this is different from something like DISC or MBTI too, which I think most listeners have actually taken at some point.
Fundamentally different. DISC and MBTI sort people into fixed types, four letters, a quadrant, a label. OAD uses continuous scales instead. Two people can both score high on assertiveness and still differ meaningfully on patience, detail orientation, or creativity. The moment you force someone into a quadrant, you throw away exactly the information that would've told you those two people need different management.
So the type systems aren't wrong, exactly, they're just lossy.
That's a fair way to put it. Rigid types carry real oversimplification risk, particularly for selection decisions, where you're deciding whether someone fits a specific role based on a label instead of where they actually sit on the relevant continuum.
Okay, so let's get into where this word list actually came from, because I don't think most people realize how long this has been in development.
It goes back to the late 1980s. Researchers ran exploratory factor analysis across multiple survey administrations with US employees between 1987 and 1990, starting from a pool of roughly two hundred fifty adjectives and narrowing it down to the current hundred and ten based on how they naturally grouped into behavioral dimensions.
And then that structure got tested again, separately, to make sure it wasn't just an artifact of that one dataset.
Confirmatory factor analysis, on an independent UK sample of roughly twenty eight hundred respondents. The structure held up across a different population entirely, which is what separates a real psychometric instrument from an arbitrary grouping exercise someone dressed up to look scientific.
And what actually comes out the other end, in terms of the scales themselves?
Six behavioral scales. Assertiveness, creativity, emotional control, detail orientation, patience, and sociability. Reliable enough, in terms of internal consistency, to support real workplace decisions, hiring, promotion, coaching, though like any self report instrument, some variation is always expected.
And this is where the Big Five comes in, because I know a lot of HR leaders have at least heard of extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability.
OAD isn't a direct clone of the Big Five, but it aligns conceptually. Sociability, assertiveness, and emotional control map roughly onto extraversion and emotional stability. Detail orientation echoes conscientiousness. But the sequence matters here, OAD was built from practical workplace demands first, and the Big Five was used as a validation reference afterward, not as the original blueprint.
So if a company's already comfortable with Big Five language, when would they reach for OAD instead?
Big Five inventories are genuinely well suited to research, broad development workshops, university contexts. But for applied HR work, hiring for a specific role, planning a leadership pipeline, analyzing team performance, OAD gives you workplace specific insight without needing to translate a research construct into a hiring decision. And critically, it adds the perceived job behavior layer we covered last episode, which a standard Big Five tool doesn't capture at all.
So the science underneath this isn't decoration, it's what makes the gap analysis from last episode trustworthy enough to actually act on.
That's exactly right. A gap between two numbers only means something if you trust the numbers, and that trust comes from decades of validation, not from a slick dashboard.
If you want to see where you land on those six scales yourself, OAD's free Top Performer Profile is a shorter, seven minute version built for a quick first look, results in twenty four hours, no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.
Pick words, not ratings. Trust the structure, not the label. That's the whole philosophy in two sentences.
Perfect place to leave it. Thanks.
Always.
OAD gives you the same clarity on people our guests talk about, from a 7-minute behavioral survey and instant insights.
