Wednesday, 23rd June 2021

Speakers: Stuart Robertson (CPsychol AFBPsS), Managing Director of Stuart Robertson & Associates and Dr Nigel Guenole (CPsychol AFBPsS), Director of Research at the Institute of Management, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Stuart started off our virtual June 2021 seminar with his topic: Assessing People with Quintax.  He summarised the origins, structure, and psychometric properties of Quintax, along with available reports.  For our second session: Maladaptive Personality at Work: Exploring the Darkness, Nigel shared one aspect of this work that industrial psychologists have been slow to embrace, namely, a new trait model that can be viewed as a maladaptive counterpart to the Big 5.  Further reviews of this seminar will be available soon.

Ben Thornton

Stuart Robertson, CPsychol, AFBPsS

Managing Director, Stuart Robertson & Associates

Assessing People with Quintax

Stuart is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the BPS.  He started his training once upon a time in Manchester when the Beatles were releasing ‘All you Need is Love’ (you do the maths), then went, via post-grad work at Sussex, to work with Norman Hotopf at LSE for a couple of years. Then spent 15 years teaching psychometrics, statistics, and experimental design to undergrad psychology and postgrad students at Manchester Poly.  Still knows how to decompose a four-way interaction into orthogonal components, but is dismayed by the number of psychologists who have never read Campbell and Stanley.  Anyway.  He left his Principal Lectureship after the Poly became self-validating and went into consulting around occupational assessment and test development – became involved with the newly formed Verifiers’ group with the BPS, began test training at Level A and, later, B.  Formed Stuart Robertson & Associates in 1991 and still works as its semi-retired MD – occasionally with associates. His main interest now is in the application of our psychometric products Quintax, CMi (Career Motivation Indicator) developed in association with Derek Wilkie – a former Director of Stuart Robertson.

Prior to the seminar, Stuart offered attendees the opportunity to complete Quintax and receive reports to enable them to understand the assessment in more detail.  During the seminar, Stuart then took us through the background to Quintax, what it measures and how it is applied in selection, development, career transition, and workshop design.  He utilised case studies to illustrate the Quintax approach to traits and types – demonstrating as many have before – that you can have your cake and eat it. The use of Quintax Type Tables in workshop situations was discussed and illustrated, along with suitable exercises for exploring team constitution and dynamics.

Ben Thornton

Dr Nigel Guenole, CPsychol, AFBPsS

Director of Research at the Institute of Management, Goldsmiths, University of London

Maladaptive Personality at Work: Exploring the Darkness

Nigel is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research for the Institute of Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. He specialises in Talent Management and Applied Statistics. Nigel’s work has appeared in leading scientific journals including Industrial Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice and Frontiers in Quantitative Psychology & Measurement, as well as in the popular press including the Sunday Times. He is the current external examiner for organisational behaviour programs at London School of Economics (LSE) and University College London (UCL). He is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS), registered with the Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC), and a member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in the United States (SIOP).

Important changes in how personality is conceptualised and measured are occurring in clinical psychology. In his discussion, Nigel focused on one aspect of this work that industrial psychologists have been slow to embrace, namely, a new trait model that can be viewed as a maladaptive counterpart to the Big 5. Nigel took us through the work he has been doing with Podium around derailers.  A case can be made that maladaptive personality profiles can be usefully and legally applied in personnel-related decision-making as long as job analysis has identified that lower standing on these traits is important for job performance, and as long as the questionnaires are designed specifically for prediction of job performance, rather than medical screening purposes.

Deeper understanding is the hallmark of Podium’s next generation darkside assessment: they provide precise insights about how you (or your candidates) come across at work, with recommendations to develop in 4 core areas to a) stay out of unnecessary conflict, b) understand people’s perspectives, c) self regulate for goal achievement d) enhance professional identity.

See the article that inspired Podium’s work here: https://lnkd.in/dGvC5f2