The Leadership WorkStyles and Team WorkStyles instruments have a solid foundation in research to ensure reliable and valid measurement of the way executives treat their colleagues and approach their jobs. Results are normed against a representative sample of professionals from a variety of U.S. industries. The instrument creator maintains extensive normative bases consisting of individual managers and of management teams. The standards for judging the instruments spring from traditionally accepted psychometric concepts regarding relevant forms of validity and reliability. As much as possible, these concepts have been translated into directly measurable standards.

Validity

• Criterion Validity: Each scale correlates positively with at least one external criterion of leadership effectiveness.
  
• Construct Validity: Each scale has a high, positive correlation with other valid measures of the same construct and a negative correlation with any scale that does not measure the same construct.
  
• Content Validity: The 12 work styles are truly revealed through the instrument, as attested by subject matter experts.

Reliability

• Across-item Consistency: for all 12 work styles is impressively high for assessments by co-workers, indicating that the items consistently measure the style they are intended to measure.
  
• Across-observer Consistency: Even with a minimum of only 4 raters, raters’ consistency in rating the same individual is relatively high and exceptionally high for some work styles. Increasing the number of raters results in even greater consistency.

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Reliability & Validity of the Knowledge Team Effectiveness Profile

Underlying the Knowledge Team Effectiveness Profile (KTEP) is a scientific model of knowledge team effectiveness. Developed and tested using one of the world’s largest databases of knowledge team dynamics, the model reveals factors that are critical to team success, the relative importance of the factors, and the relationship between them. The factors that KTEP measures were selected from more than 100 tested and are the most significant for predicting a team’s high performance.

KTEP research is based on studies of 520 knowledge and research teams, having 2,838 team members combined, with an average team size of 5.5 members. Validation studies independently assessed whether specific teams were or were not successful, demonstrating that KTEP is measuring actual, real-world performance. Internal consistency of the KTEP is very high. Cronbach Alpha is above 0.8 for all clusters but Resources.

It is normally not possible to infer cause and effect on the basis of statistical correlations. However, a statistical technique called “structural equation modeling” allowed researchers to formulate and test hypotheses about the effect of the 17 KTEP team performance indicators on one another. The result of the research clearly suggests a direction to the factor correlations, which leads to conclusions regarding which factors are likely to have the greatest impact upon team performance.

All of the testing has shown KTEP to be a sound tool for measuring the performance of knowledge and R&D teams.

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Reliability & Validity of the Leadership Skills & Team Skills Assessments

The Leadership Skills and Team Skills instruments have a solid foundation in research to ensure reliable and valid measurement of skills. Results are normed against a national database of 3,700 managers and 20,000 co-workers. The standards spring from traditionally accepted psychometric concepts regarding relevant forms of validity and reliability. As much as possible, these concepts have been translated into directly measurable standards.

Validity

• Criterion Validity: Each scale correlates positively with at least one external criterion of effectiveness.
  
• Construct Validity: Each scale has a high, positive correlation with other valid measures of the same construct and a low or negative correlation with any scale that does not measure the same construct.
  
• Content Validity: Each scale represents a set of trainable behaviors or skills important to job performance, as recognized by subject matter experts.

Reliability

• The Across-item Consistency of all 20 scales is impressively high for assessments by co-workers and exceed the pre-testing standards set by Acumen.
  
• Across-observer Consistency: Even with a minimum of only 4 raters, raters’ consistency in rating the same individual is relatively high and exceptionally high for some behavioral scales. Increasing the number of raters results in even greater consistency.

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Reliability & Validity of the Organizational Culture Inventory

The Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) is the product of a long-term research program initiated in 1983. The objective of this research was to develop a valid and reliable inventory for measuring organizational norms and expectations – that is, the thinking and behavioral styles that members believe they must exhibit to “fit in” and meet expectations within their organization.

The foundation research was reported in 1987. At that time, the OCI had been used to assess cultural norms in a wide variety of organizations including heavy manufacturing and high technology firms, research and development laboratories, schools and universities, government agencies, and volunteer organizations. Approximately 20,000 people in over 100 organizations had by then completed the OCI. The results indicated that the OCI measures organization-level phenomena, that horizontal and vertical differences within organizations may be detected, and that these differences were directly related to an organization’s management style. The results predicted differences in the productivity and quality of work of employees, which impact an organization’s effectiveness in meeting its goals.

Since then, the OCI has been used by the Federal Aviation Administration, Argonne National Laboratories, the United States Navy, major retailing organizations, international pharmaceutical companies, and by hundreds of other clients, among them a client of Human Synergistics, OCI’s developer, in 150 supermarkets of the Coca-Cola Research Council.

The instrument has been tested extensively with respect to its reliability and validity and its appropriateness for use in organizational change and management development programs. Please see the Sanders and Cooke article on this website.

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