Appendix: Psychological Assessment Tools
The author reviews some of the assessment tools that can be used to gain insight on how individuals may react in various situations, which can be valuable information when considering possible actions of a competing firm, or a vendor or customer, or even of individuals within your own organization.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the workhorse of personality assessment: it provides a fairly detailed assessment of the individual styles, habits, and motivations of individuals.
The Firo-B (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation) assessment tool seeks to measure three basic social needs: inclusion (the desire to be part of a group), control (the ability to exert power), and affection (personal "warmth"), scoring each as high, moderate, or low. This profile can help predict how individuals seek roles and position themselves within their work environments.
The DiSC profile measures dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness, and is considered an outstanding tool for target marketing, sales, and negotiation.
The Sixteen Personality Factor system (16PF) considers an array of personality factors to arrive at a general profile. The author recommends this for considering the elements of corporate culture, especially when attempting to manage assimilation in the wake of a merger or acquisition.
The People Map considers personality types and categorizes individuals into six basic types. It's a fairly facile tool, but uses very few questions and can be easy to apply remotely.
The Birkman Test is the best instrument for predicting the negative response behavior of an individual - how a person is likely to react, emotionally, in response to a stressful situation.
The Team Management index measures role preferences and learning styles of an individual in the context of a group, and is useful in developing collaborative relationships or predicting the effect of adding an individual to a team.
The Attentional and Interpersonal Style Inventory (TAIS) is a questionnaire that measures the concentration skills and interpersonal preferences of individuals, which are the underlying "building blocks" on which more complex behaviors are based. It's a common assessment used when assembling teams, and is often used in screening employees.
Executive Decision Style identifies an the key decision-making processes an individual exercises when empowered to make a decision - specifically, how they consider information, evaluate solutions, reject some, and prefer others.
(EN: I'm familiar with a handful of these, as they're often used in teambuilding exercises, culture building, and managerial training courses. Some of them involve extensive questionnaires, which would make them difficult to use to assess a person covertly - such as examining a competitor - and all of them come with some danger of stereotyping - so I find them of dubious value. If you assume that someone fits into a given category, you could be making a major mistake - and while a little information is better than none, making decisions based on bad information is much worse than making decisions that account for a lack of information.)