Psychometric profile based on the psychology of temperaments.

"Temperament is the background murmur of feelings that mark our basic disposition. Temperament can be defined in terms of the moods that typify our emotional life. To some degree we each have a favoured emotional range, temperament is given at birth, part of the genetic lottery....."
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence, 1995.

Your temperament, being your basic disposition, is relevant to action in all situations - in work and in non-work contexts. Psychometric profiling is a way of making your personal characteristics - like temperament - more apparent. Your answers to survey questions are used to produce a diagram with a distinctive shape that shows the relative strengths of your basic qualities.

When you have your temperament profile prepared it can help you:

- to harmonise personal and work relationships;
- to enhance efficiency and satisfaction in personal life;
- to map a career path on a more rational basis; and so on.

BACKGROUND

The Four Category Temperament Profile [known as the 4CTP] is a new psychometric instrument designed by psychologist Simon Crosby and built on earlier versions which have been gradually refined and validated in over ten years of use. Why have yet another psychometric profiler? It is useful because temperament issues usually are touched on in various psychometrics but they are so embedded in other considerations that they do not stand out clearly enough in the result.

The need to get to know a person quite well, and quite quickly, was the impetus behind the creation of The Four Category Temperament Profile. It was developed as an interviewing-aid in Simon Crosby's consulting psychology practice. The purpose of the profile was to give the interviewer an early view of a person's way of behaving, before knowing much about his or her daily life. It was soon seen that this sort of knowledge is useful in the work environment, and in inter-personal private contexts as well.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TEMPERAMENT

The idea of temperament has a long and respectable history. It arose in the ancient world in the time of Hippocrates. It was then based on the predominance of inner body-processes that were seen as typical of certain outward dispositions. Words recently in quite common use, such as sanguine and phlegmatic, are legacies of this ancient way of viewing people.

Temperament gradually lost its association with inner physiology. It became more of a psychological idea. But an unusual one because, unlike many psychological notions, a person's dominant temperament is, with practise, easy to observe - even without the subject uttering a single word. This is why temperament has become associated with action-style. Many authorities have noted the correlation between body-type and temperament.

Although temperament is something which truly characterises people, it is necessary to remember that it is an abstraction - we deal mostly with whole persons who are unfragmented, even if they display some personality aspects more strongly than others.

OBSERVING TEMPERAMENT

The easiest place to see the realities of temperament is in a large family. Even allowing for differences [such as birth-order] it often seems extraordinary that children of the same family and basic upbringing can have such different styles - there seems to be no way to account for these differences apart from their being, to an extent, innate.

Much of life is about reducing uncertainty. Personal and business life is based on views of how things may turn out. When we consider a colleague's temperament we do just that. Once we know someone's disposition we can predict quite a lot - not about exactly what that person may do, but how he or she is most likely to react. And if we also have good knowledge of our own temperament we can also know how we are likely to get on with that person, and with others.

Temperament is something we all recognise quite readily - the proof of that lies in common phrases we use. We all know what is meant if someone says that a person is temperamentally unsuited to some task, or to some person. But that can be a bit vague - temperament profiling makes it less so.

HOW TO GET YOUR TEMPERAMENT PROFILE MADE

The latest version of the 4CTP enables you to carry out self-rating plus self-interpretation [using an interpretation guide] on a simple questionnaire which we send you on request order form. When completed you send the from back to us for scoring. When we receive your completed questionnaire we make a graphic profile of your temperament-mix using software which assesses your questionnaire answers. The software incorporates a weighting system and a system of boundaries to produce a clear representation of your temperament-mix. Your profile will be sent to you with a six-page interpretation guide.

THE PERSONAL USES OF YOUR TEMPERAMENT PROFILE

-	to enable you to understand and accept yourself more fully,
-	to indicate the less prominent areas of your personality that you may need to find ways to enhance,
-	to share with friends and relations to enable them to be more accepting of who you are, and have more understanding of the choices you make in life,
-	if you have areas of interpersonal conflict you may find the profiles useful in resolving things - especially if the other person has had profiling done,
-	to use in work-life so that colleagues and managers can interact intelligently with you and have respect for how you function,
-	to use in job-interviews to add weight to your explanations about your suitability,
-	to help you plan and focus therapy or personal growth programs.

THE USE OF TEMPERAMENT PROFILES TO MANAGERS

Managers who design human-resource interventions are able to support their work by having a measure of peoples' temperament aspects. The design of strategies is greatly enhanced when the various dynamics in situations are studied as precisely as possible, particularly in the light of temperament.

A client's example will make this clear. A team of four people were doing an identical, but interdependent, task. Other psychometrics had shown that each person had characteristics that made them suitable for the task. One of the four did well in the team, one did badly, the other two performed averagely well. A temperament survey revealed that the person who was not doing well had a single temperament dominance that made him quite unfit for teamwork, but ideal for working on his own. The person doing well in the team had a temperament dominance clearly favouring teamwork as against solo working.

Apart from their use to managers, temperament profiles enable an organisation's human resuorces to know themselves and their colleagues better. Then they have more options in approaching team-members and tasks. To leave temperament out of account is to overlook a significant aspect of performance and personality.

BASIC READING LIST

Contact: Simon@SussexPsychotherapy.co.uk

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