katherine benziger – personality assessments

Overview of Dr Katherine Benziger’s personality assessment model for personal and organizational development, plus more free online training materials for personal and organizational training and development.

Excerpt found on www.businessballs.com

Dr Katherine Benziger is a true pioneer and leading expert in her field. Her work has for the past 25 years focused on the proper and ethical development and application of personality assessing in the global business environment. Significantly, Dr Benziger prefers the term personality assessing, rather than personality testing, to describe her approach. Katherine Benziger is keen to distance herself from the ‘personality testing’ industry, for which ‘falsification of type’, and the interests of the individual – rather than the organisation – are not generally seen as a priority concerns. For Dr Benziger they are.

See also the Personality Models and Types section which includes more about Benziger’s theory in relation to Jung, Myers Briggs, Eysenck, and other personality theories.

Also importantly, Benziger’s systems are not psychometric tests. Many non-scientific people now use the term ‘psychometrics’ to cover the wide range of systems and tools used in testing, measuring and assessing all kinds of attributes in people, but strictly speaking this is incorrect. The term ‘psychometrics’ actually means the psychological theory or technique of mental measurement. Psychometrics and psychometric tests in this pure sense are often (and in certain countries necessarily) practised and administered only by people holding a PhD in psychology. This inherently can cause ‘pure’ psychometrics theory and testing tools to be less accessible for typical business and organisational applications.

Benziger’s work, model and assessment systems are instead based on the measurement of brain function and energy consumption in the brain. This study of brain function is a different science, and a more recent one than psychology and psychometrics (the study of brain function has for instance been particularly aided by the advent of recent brain scanning technologies such as PET and MRI). The accessibility and application of Benziger’s work and systems do not suffer the same restrictions and limitations as pure psychometrics, and as such offer potentially enormous benefits to organisations.

Benziger is keen to focus on the common tendency of people in work, whether being assessed or not, to ‘falsify type’. She rightly says that when people adapt their natural thinking and working styles to fit expectations of others, normally created by work and career, tension and stress results. People are not happy and effective if they behave in unnatural ways, and much of Benziger’s work focuses on dealing with these issues and the costs of falsifying.

Relating directly to this is the work Arlene Taylor PhD, a leading specialist in ‘wellness’ since 1980, and collaborator with Benziger for much of that time.

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