We all have drives, which create needs. Our behaviors are a response to a need. The PI Behavioral Assessment measures the amount and intensity of the four key behavioral drives to help predict and understand workplace behavior.
After several years of refining, Arnold Daniels created the Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment™ (BA). It was specifically designed to measure four motivating needs, or drives, that had the biggest effect on workplace behaviors: Dominance, Extraversion, Patience, and Formality.
If you know where a person falls for each factor, you possess a great deal of knowledge about what it would be like to work with them.
DOMINANCE: The drive to exert one’s influence on people or events.
EXTRAVERSION: The drive for social interaction with others.
PATIENCE: The drive for consistency and stability.
FORMALITY: The drive to conform to rules or structure.
Everyone has some amount of all four of these drives, which we call factors. Understanding the combination of the four factors and their intensity allows you to, very specifically, describe how a person prefers to communicate, make decisions, delegate, regard rules, and take action. This is your window into how a person prefers to behave.
Once you complete the Behavioral Assessment, you’ll see your Pattern and your Reference Profile.
- Pattern: Think of this as your specific location or address. Your pattern is unique to you and your assessment results.
- Reference Profile: Think of this as your general area or neighborhood. This gives you some basic details about a person without having to know the specific amount of dominance, extraversion, patience, or formality they have.
Factors on a pattern
When you look at your results, you’ll see a pattern like the example below. Factors appear as blue circles and they always appear, from top to bottom, A, B, C, D.
Factors that fall to the left of the midpoint represent a low amount of that particular drive, while those that land to the right of the midpoint represent a high amount.
Since there are no right or wrong responses to the Behavioral Assessment, low and high are neither good nor bad, they’re simply indicators to provide you with language and data to help you better understand a person.
The further away from the midpoint a factor falls, the more forceful the expression of its associated behaviors will be. Because the way a drive is expressed changes depending on the level of that factor, the words we use to describe someone’s behavior change depending on how far their factor is from the midpoint. Let’s explore each one.
In the interactive below, choose which factor you’d like to learn more about from the left. Then, drag the factor icon right or left on the slider to see how behaviors become stronger or more forcefully expressed the higher or lower they are from the midpoint on their pattern.
Factor E: Subjectivity and Objectivity
You’ll also see Factor E in some areas. This helps describe how what kinds of inputs someone is likely to rely on when making decisions.
How is E different from ABCD?
Factors A, B, C, and D measure the amount of a drive someone has, from extremely low to extremely high. Factor E is used as a secondary, modifying factor because it is not part of the theoretical behavioral model that underpins the primary factors. This means it’s possible to meet two people with the same Pattern who have different decision-making styles. For that reason, Factor E is visualized separately from A, B, C, and D.
Examples:
- If someone has a low C, they have a low amount of Patience. If they have a high C, they have a high amount of Patience.
- If someone has a high D, they prefer a lot of structure. If they have a low D, structure is not a priority.
E is different in that it’s not measuring how little or how much of a drive you have. Rather, it’s telling us if, when it comes time to make a decision, you’ll rely more heavily on subjective or objective information. We show this by putting the factor to the left or right of the midpoint:
- If you see E on the left, it means a person will be more subjective in making decisions. Their ‘gut feeling’ is quite important, and they’re less likely to seek out all sides of the story prior to making decisions. They’ll rely more on what feels right, even if there aren’t numbers to back it up.
- If it’s on the right, they’ll be more objective. They’ll want to examine facts, check sources, and look to the data to guide their decisions.
Sigmas
There are times when you might see numbers and sigma symbols as part of a Behavioral Pattern. Sigmas appear on either side of the midpoint and show how far the person’s factor is from the overall norm sample average. Factor or “sigma” (𝜎) scores represent the standardized scores compared to other people around the world who selected the same number of adjectives.
One sigma range essentially represents one standard deviation from the overall norm sample average. So, if you score farther left than -1.0𝜎 or farther right than 1.0𝜎, it means you are scoring higher than 68% of people for a given factor (conditional on the overall response rate). If you score farther left than -2.0𝜎 or farther right than 2.0𝜎, it means you are scoring higher than 95% of people. If you are in the rare group that scores farther left than -3.0𝜎 or farther right than 3.0𝜎, it means you are scoring higher than 99% of people!
Get even more insights with Factor Combinations
The four factors measure specific behavioral drives and give us a great amount of information on how a person prefers to behave. We can learn even more about why people behave the way they do by looking at the how two behavioral drives interact. We call these Factor Combinations.