Dr K. Interview

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Yesterday I had the honour and pleasure to be interviewed by Gary Pheiffer who runs the Master's in business psychology programme at Heriot-Watt University. The recording is going to be exclusive to the students, but I can share two interviews I did earlier:

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https://www.psysoft.com/post/using-hucama-personality-factors

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Podcasts Archive - CykoMetrix

https://www.cykometrix.com/podcast/

CykoMetrix - Dr. Rainer Kurz – The Psychology of Human Capital Management

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What is ‘Dr K.’ all about?

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I started off by explaining that my original inclination was to study Clinical Psychology (an interest that many Occupational Psychologists I asked share) to better understand myself, my family, and problems in the world. When it came to University applications, I listed Psychology, Business Studies, and Medicine. I am now operating within this ‘triangle’ at work (Leadership, Derailment, Neurodiversity) and in my Pro Bono activities where I investigate complex trauma assessment problems.

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At the outset of my Psychology studies in 1986, I tortured my former school mates with an audio-visual reaction time test that I programmed on my Commodore C64 computer. At Hull University I explored in 1990 rule-based item generation for a numerical reasoning test, Speed-Accuracy Trade-off, and the use of open answer formats. People could not really understand what I was doing and why (a common theme in my career) but a decade later unsupervised online testing arrived and what I researched is now routinely applied. Success!

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When asked about online assessments I relayed a story about a geezer who hired someone in India to ace his test – to hear what happened next have a look here:

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https://youtu.be/2W5IboB8csE

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I harked back to my first ever conference paper which was on Test Orientation Practice co-authored by Prof Dave Bartram and MSc student Babli Lodh. A lecturer who hated my employer SHL asked me to come to the BPS DOP Conference Press Office where he smirked just before my talk: ‘Do you still have a job?’ ?He had leaked my embargoed abstract to a journalist who penned an article with a grossly misleading headline (‘courtesy’ of The Independent editor) ‘Aptitude testing is fundamentally flawed’ which I then held up at the start of my talk. Rounding the session off, the late Prof Peter Saville asked a difficult question at the end (my colleagues told him off – but I felt ‘honoured’ by his interest). Nowadays, with introduction and control of testing condition out-of-the-WWW-Window, we nevertheless need to inform, relax, and motivate candidates to do their best – completing a strictly timed aptitude test at the bus stop or in the pub is a bad idea.

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Gary asked how it was like - being on the ‘Dream Team’ at Saville. I explained that we had lots of ‘creative conflict’ (with an emphasis on the former in the first 5 years). We squeezed the lemon and developed a great tool.

Academics take a sabbatical every few years. I have some 'time off' (involuntarily) whenever I lose my job. When the SHL Research Division was closed in 2002 I cycled home in my lunch break and told my wife: ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we are going to travel around the world. The bad news? I will have no job to go back to’.

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At Saville I ‘fell off the tree’ after standing up (privately) against an organised crime group that weaponised poor psychometric assessment practice in a chilling case of ‘Jimmy Savile’ scandal nature and magnitude. Since then, I have read up and presented 30+ paper about complex trauma assessment problems that can be downloaded from my ResearchGate profile:

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https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rainer_Kurz2

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At Cubiks, I developed 6 tools in 6 years. The sale to PSI financed our kitchen extension but I was once more ‘sur plus to requirements’.

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I had learned from the shock (trauma?) of my first redundancy and put an effort into developing relationships. This involved during my ‘Post-Saville Sabbatical’ arranging breakfast with HUCAMA CEO Michele Guarini in Copenhagen on a Legoland-to-Bornholm Scandinavia trip. He had always been a great fan of the GREAT 8 since swapping professional football coaching with a SHL Denmark consultant role (a few years after I had left in 2002). Our first encounter was on the car park outside the EAWOP Congress 2007 in Stockholm where he came up to me saying: ‘You must be Rainer Kurz?!?’ When he asked me in 2014 ‘could we do something together’ I said ‘Sorry. I am already taken. I will start at Cubiks in July.’ Six years on, Michele snapped me up when I became available.

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I am delighted to declare that the ominous ‘Number Series’ curse of losing my job after 12 (SHL), 9 (Saville) and 6 (Cubiks) years is no more – hooray to my HUCAMA job offer 4 years ago.

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Asked about my current activities, I emphasised the simplicity and elegance of concentrating on personality, ability, and competency assessment in HUCAMA FACTORS. All tools are operational in English, German, Danish, Swedish and Finnish with instruments also available in Spanish, French, Romanian, Norwegian and Chinese.

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On the topic ‘performance’, I explained that I viewed this as the ‘Black Hole of Occupational Psychology’. Borman & Motowidlo (1993) differentiated between job and contextual performance – two factors that appeared in the IMC criterion factor analysis of Bartram (2005). In OPQ CM4.2 (ipsative) predictor data a dispositional counterpart to contextual performance emerged with high loadings for Agreeableness and Emotional Stability scales. At Saville we called that ‘Working Together’. Job performance potential was split into a leadership factor we called ‘Promoting Change’, underpinned by Extraversion and Openness (Beta/Plasticity), and a proficiency factor we called ‘Demonstrating Capability’, underpinned by Conscientiousness and Critical Reasoning. The 'Three-Effectiveness Factors' model featured in a 2009 ADM article (with mangled tables and graphics – ‘oh dear, BPS’ I thought at the time) and at the 11th European Conference on Psychological Assessment conference 2011 when my Baltic Coast Tour reached Riga. Whereas Hogan & Holland (2003) differentiated ‘GETTING ALONG’ and ‘GETTING AHEAD’ aspects of performance, we added GETTING IT RIGHT at Saville where Rab’s catch-phrase was (with respect to moving beyond socio-analytic theory) ‘We are not just monkeys’. At HUCAMA we separated GETTING ALIGNED for the communication piece out of GETTING AHEAD. Who would like to argue with me that these four quadrants do NOT provide a succinct language for performance at work?

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Gary was interested in the origin and current trajectory of the Great 8 which started as ‘Competencies’ in the Kurz & Bartram (2002) book chapter but are in HUCAMA FACTORS positioned as GREAT 8 SUCCESS FACTORS that straddle across personality and competency modalities. I explained, with reference to DeYoung’s (2015) Cybernetic Big 5 Theory, that splitting Conscientiousness into Order and Industriousness aspects is in my view ‘not good enough’. Achievement striving tends to carry the bulk of the well-established validity of Conscientiousness in professional and managerial jobs, and therefore deserved its dedicated DRIVE factor in the GREAT 8 SUCCESS FACTORS model to complement STRUCTURE. Validity patterns for IMC Leadership and Action Orientation were barely accounted for by conventional Extraversion algorithms. We added Need for Power as a construct which now underpins the INFLUENCE factor that complements INTERACTION. My former SHL Japan colleague Aki Gotoh combined in her MSc thesis (1999) eight International Validation Studies (IVS) with data from Japan and Korea showing that most competencies are primarily behavioural, some (Written Communication, Specialist Knowledge) primarily cognitive and others (e.g. Problem Solving, Creativity) ‘in between’. This gave rise to separating out an evaluative factor (Need for Cognition) out of Openness called INVESTIGATION in HUCAMA FACTORS which complements CREATIVITY. Agreeableness in the GREAT 8 SUCCESS FACTORS model takes the ‘positive’ bits and combines them with the heart of Emotional Intelligence into a SUPPORT factor. The ‘disagreeable’ themes we reversed into Confrontation (in INFLUENCE), Competitiveness (in DRIVE) and Analysis (in INVESTIGATION) facets. We cover five of six NEO Neuroticism facets in RESILIENCE. Self-consciousness was ‘too introverted’ for our liking so that we reversed the construct and created a related facet ‘Persuasiveness’ (i.e. attempting to convince others - without fear of rejection) which turns out to have the highest statistical loading on the ‘General Factor of Personality’ (GFP) that emerges from Personality Factors (PF48).

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I am looking forward to our symposia sessions at SIOP (virtual), ITC (Granada) and ICP (Prague - where I will also present at the International Congress of Psychology’ my first ever paper on ‘Cybernetic Great 8 Theory’).

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If you are intrigued by this, please come on my next virtual HUCAMA FACTORS Accreditation Workshop on 10th April 2024. Feel free to complete Personality Factors and Competency Factors from the self-registration link below:

https://factors.hucama.com/t/s/URHC

·????? Personality Factors (PF48) takes about 30 minutes.

·????? Competency Factors (CF48) takes about 7 minutes.

Optionally, participants can nominate external raters to provide feedback on their work style.

Following completion, participants can download a freebie Personal Report covering 48 facets grouped into 8 SUCCESS FACTORS.

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