Measuring personality at work: development and validation of a new instrument based on the Enneagram

In spite of the enduring scientific debates around the validity and usefulness of measuring personality in a work environment, practitioners continue to rely heavily on personality testing for selection decision making as well as for personal development purposes. These well-spread practices raise two major concerns. First of all, most personality measures used in a professional context provide scant, incomplete or troubling psychometric information concerning their construct-related and criterion-related validity. Second, over years, some theoretical models and some instruments have acquired a quasi-monopolistic position, which could be harmful to the progress of theories and practices in this field. In particular, the Big Five is now the dominant traits-based approache of personality and seems able to capture the wide range of dimensions tapped by most inventories whereas the Jungian typology and its privileged instrument, the MBTI, have become the main reference for the types-based approaches. In this context, the present study describes the development of a new instrument, called HPEI, based on an emerging personality theory: the Enneagram. Based on the Sufi Philosophy, this theory was popularized in the Western world in the end of the 20th century. The Enneagram takes human egoistic fears and desires as the source of the formation of the personality and behavior. This theory distinguishes nine personality types, known as the Performer, the Helper, the Motivator, the Romantic, the Thinker, the Skeptic, the Enthusiast, the Leader and the Peace-Maker. Grounded in an original theoretical background, this typology would be totally non-redundant with major contemporary personality approaches, in particular with the Big Five and the Jungian typology. In keeping with DeVellis (1991), three successive quantitative data collections were used to develop the HPEI. First, an initial pool of items (108) was generated to reflect the nine types of the Enneagram and pretested on two samples of respectively 285 and 205 respondents. Initial scales were refined through iterations of internal consistency and principal components analyses, leading to a reduced pool of 59 items. In a second step, the HPEI factor structure and scales reliability were tested and confirmed on a sample of 330 adults coming from diversified organizational contexts. Finally, a third step will consist in testing the convergences and divergences between the HPEI and the MBTI on the one hand, and the NEO-PI5 on the other hand. Psychometric properties of the HPEI will be compared with those of some similar instruments available in the scientific literature.