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Why OAD Uses Word Selection Instead of Ratings · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:03
  Edwin, last episode we talked about the gap between traits and perceived job
• 0:07
  behavior.
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  Today I want to go one layer deeper, into why OAD even uses this adjective-selection
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  format in the first place, instead of the rating scales most personality tests use.
• 0:18
  Because rating scales have a built-in flaw, Claire.
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  The moment you ask someone to rate how strongly they agree with a statement like "I
• 0:26
  stay calm under pressure," you've invited them to answer the way they think the
• 0:30
  employer wants to hear.
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  That's social desirability bias, and it's not a minor rounding error,
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  it can meaningfully distort a hiring decision.
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  Whereas picking words from a list feels lower-stakes, there's no obvious "right"
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  adjective to reach for.
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  Exactly, you scan a hundred and ten words and select the ones that honestly describe
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  you, there's no statement to strategically agree or disagree with.
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  And that word list isn't arbitrary.
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  It's been refined through psychometric item analysis specifically to strip out vague
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  or trendy adjectives that just add noise without adding signal.
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  And this is different from something like DISC or MBTI too,
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  which I think most listeners have actually taken at some point.
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  Fundamentally different.
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  DISC and MBTI sort people into fixed types, four letters, a quadrant,
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  a label.
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  OAD uses continuous scales instead.
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  Two people can both score high on assertiveness and still differ meaningfully on
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  patience, detail orientation, or creativity.
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  The moment you force someone into a quadrant, you throw away exactly the information
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  that would've told you those two people need different management.
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  So the type systems aren't wrong, exactly, they're just lossy.
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  That's a fair way to put it.
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  Rigid types carry real oversimplification risk, particularly for selection
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  decisions, where you're deciding whether someone fits a specific role based on a
• 1:51
  label instead of where they actually sit on the relevant continuum.
• 1:54
  Okay, so let's get into where this word list actually came from,
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  because I don't think most people realize how long this has been in development.
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  It goes back to the late 1980s.
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  Researchers ran exploratory factor analysis across multiple survey administrations
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  with US employees between 1987 and 1990, starting from a pool of roughly two hundred
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  fifty adjectives and narrowing it down to the current hundred and ten based on how
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  they naturally grouped into behavioral dimensions.
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  And then that structure got tested again, separately, to make sure it wasn't just an
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  artifact of that one dataset.
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  Confirmatory factor analysis, on an independent UK sample of roughly twenty-eight
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  hundred respondents.
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  The structure held up across a different population entirely,
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  which is what separates a real psychometric instrument from an arbitrary grouping
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  exercise someone dressed up to look scientific.
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  And what actually comes out the other end, in terms of the scales themselves?
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  Six behavioral scales.
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  Assertiveness, creativity, emotional control, detail orientation,
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  patience, and sociability.
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  Reliable enough, in terms of internal consistency, to support real workplace
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  decisions, hiring, promotion, coaching, though like any self-report instrument,
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  some variation is always expected.
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  And this is where the Big Five comes in, because I know a lot of HR leaders have at
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  least heard of extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness,
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  emotional stability.
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  OAD isn't a direct clone of the Big Five, but it aligns conceptually.
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  Sociability, assertiveness, and emotional control map roughly onto extraversion and
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  emotional stability.
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  Detail orientation echoes conscientiousness.
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  But the sequence matters here, OAD was built from practical workplace demands first,
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  and the Big Five was used as a validation reference afterward,
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  not as the original blueprint.
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  So if a company's already comfortable with Big Five language,
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  when would they reach for OAD instead?
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  Big Five inventories are genuinely well suited to research,
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  broad development workshops, university contexts.
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  But for applied HR work, hiring for a specific role, planning a leadership pipeline,
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  analyzing team performance, OAD gives you workplace-specific insight without needing
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  to translate a research construct into a hiring decision.
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  And critically, it adds the perceived-job-behavior layer we covered last episode,
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  which a standard Big Five tool doesn't capture at all.
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  So the science underneath this isn't decoration, it's what makes the gap analysis
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  from last episode trustworthy enough to actually act on.
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  That's exactly right.
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  A gap between two numbers only means something if you trust the numbers,
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  and that trust comes from decades of validation, not from a slick dashboard.
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  If you want to see where you land on those six scales yourself,
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  OAD's free Top Performer Profile is a shorter, seven-minute version built for a
• 4:47
  quick first look, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card.
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  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
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  Pick words, not ratings.
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  Trust the structure, not the label.
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  That's the whole philosophy in two sentences.
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  Perfect place to leave it.
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  Thanks, Edwin.
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  Always, Claire.