Uncovering Characteristics of Being AGILE
Agility Personality ProfileTM
The Agility Personality ProfileTM (APP) is a unique personality assessment specifically developed to assess the underlying characteristics of agility.
What is the Objective of the Agility Personality ProfileTM?
The APP focuses on the five relatively stable traits that support behavioral agility, which we uncovered through rigorous scientific research. These five personality dimensions are: Focus, Proactivity, Confidence, Optimism and Inquisitiveness.
Focus: Tends to create goals and concentrate upon them until completion. Stays on track even when it is difficult to do so. Becomes fully engaged in tasks.
Proactivity: Avoids a reactive mindset. Anticipates tasks and continually looks for ways to make progress. Accepts the need to act without complete information.
Confidence: Approaches work with a sense of self-assuredness. Has a high degree of trust in own abilities. Eager to face challenges.
Optimism: Looks for positive aspects of difficult situations. Bounces back after failing To achieve. Finds hidden opportunities within problems or challenges.
Inquisitiveness: Values the opportunity to learn. Comfortable in new situations. Seeks and benefits from experiences that demand the acquisition of new knowledge or skill.
The APP consists of 50 items that accurately and reliably measure agility.
The assessment is securely administered on-line and results in a full report of your scores compared to others that have taken it. The report also includes developmental activities that will increase your agility.
Uses for the Agility Personality ProfileTM
- Training and orienting new employees
- Building and strengthening teams
- Developing and empowering high potential leaders
- Facilitating understanding among team members
- Tailoring leadership development programs to participant’s personalities
How we developed the items. To develop items for the APPTM, we followed rigorous, research-based methods. We reviewed more than 150 published studies of topics related to personality and agility and identified a number of personality traits related to agility. We then reviewed all previously validated measures for those related personality traits to provide a foundation regarding the areas that the APPTM needed to cover.
Based upon that review, we wrote 132 original items. Then, we conducted three sets of surveys to examine the items in further detail. Data for the first survey, which included 135 responses from working professionals, revealed that 66 items correlated with a validated measure of adaptive performance potential (theoretically similar to agility) at the .40 level or above. We then eliminated any items with less than .40 item-total correlations, resulting in retaining 58 items. We collected a second set of data from another group of 135 working professionals, who responded to the 58 items retained after the first study above. We dropped three less-reliable items upon examination of the data, resulting in 55 highly reliable items. In addition to developing a highly reliable scale, however, it is essential to have a valid set of items— one that measures what we think it should measure (in this case, a behavioral predisposition toward agility).
To determine how the 55-item agile scale relates with other validated personality traits, we conducted a third survey, which collected data from a third set of 161 working professionals. Participants responded to the 55 agility items as well as items from 10 other previously validated scales. As expected, the agility scale created with those 55 items correlated positively as expected with eight traits (e.g., positivity, openness, conscientiousness) and negatively as expected with two traits (negativity and neuroticism). Therefore, the scale is both highly reliable (Cronbach’s alpha = .96) and valid with regard to measuring what it should measure measure. The final remaining step is to determine the relationship between the scale and job performance.
- Agility Personality Profile