Why Business Profile?

Background for Alva's Business Profile

Morgan Pihl avatar
Written by Morgan Pihl
Updated over a week ago

Alva's Business Profile is designed to provide a simple summary of your personality results. While the personality test provides rich and accurate results, based on the five factor model of personality, it is challenging to make use of these results effectively in a team context. How do you compare 10 people on 5 dimensions of personality, or indeed 15 if you consider all facets, without getting a headache?

Our ambition with Business Profile is to provide another level of abstraction that is useful in a team context, so that we can visualize team members next to each other in the same graph. 

We took inspiration from research showing that there are two higher-order personality factors, called Alpha and Beta, that are hierarchically above the five factors (read more here). In this framework, Alpha is a combination of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability while Beta is a combination of Extraversion and Openness. To be useful in team development, we decided to leave out Emotional Stability and created two dimensions called 1) Initiating-Completing, which consists of Extraversion and Openness, and 2) Result focused - Relationship focused, which consists of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. 

The following characteristics define the endpoints of these dimensions:

Initiating
Assertive
Energetic
Curious
Change oriented

Completing

Down-to-earth
Conservative
Accommodating
Low-key

Result
focused
Industrious
Careful
Forthright
Indifferent

Relationship focused
Compassionate
Polite
Easy-going
Spontaneous

By creating a 2-by-2 grid from these dimensions, we can visualize the personality characteristics of teams, which can shed light on potential team strengths and challenges. For example, a team of people who have very similar personalities will likely get along well and share ambitions, while they might be missing important perspectives and risk making uninformed decisions.

From the same grid, the business profile is defined. Read more about the calculation HERE

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