THE BIG FIVE

About the Five-Factor Model

The Five-Factor Model of Personality is the most current, valid, reliable means of assessing personality available.  Psychologists use it as the primary means of understanding and interpreting personality.  The Five-Factor Model is:

• Reliable: Extremely reliable compared to available personality inventories
• Acceptable: High acceptance of personal results by those tested
• Respected: Currently the most widely respected personality model in the personality research community
• Valid: Established predictive validity across a variety of jobs
• Uncomplicated: No theory to understand, a clear vocabulary of individual similarities and differences
• Compatible: Serves as a road map to major theories of personality

From the mid-1980’s to the mid-1990’s, the Five-Factor Model was tested and re-tested in the academic and research communities world-wide and found to be superior to prior means of explaining and describing personality. 

The business community began to take the Five-Factor Model seriously when an article by Pierce and Jane Howard was published in the September 1995 issue of Training and Development.  The article, “Buddy, Can You Paradigm?,” gave a brief history of the model’s development and explains how the Five-Factor Model may be used to understand individuals, relationships and teams in work situations.

Organizations are using the Five-Factor Model for the depth and understanding it offers employees in all aspects of human resource development. Key components of the Five-Factor Model:

• Personality has five dimensions
• Scores on dimensions will fall along a normal distribution (bell curve)
• Personality is best described by individual traits rather than type groupings
• Strength of individual scores indicates personality preferences
• People scoring in the midrange prefer a balance of the two extremes for that trait

History & Theory

For three decades, the training community has generally followed the assumptions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:

• a four-dimension model
• bimodal distribution of scores on each dimension
• sixteen independent types
• the concept of a primary function determined by Judger/Perceiver preference
• a grounding in the personality theory of Carl Jung

The emerging new paradigm is not a radical departure from the Myers-Briggs but rather an evolution requiring a significant shift in thinking. The new paradigm involves:

• five dimensions of personality
• normal distribution of scores on these dimensions
• emphasis on individual personality traits
• type concept replaced by blends concept        
• preferences indicated by strength of score
• model based on experience, not theory