Alva's Growth Factors were created to provide an additional layer of insights from our personality test. The purpose was to give the test taker more material for self-awareness and self-developmen aswell as provide even more insights from our personality test, to candidates as well as to recruiters and hiring managers. These insights are meant to provide guidance for how to further grow and flourish at work.

A five factor personality result offers rich information about an individual’s preferences, driving forces, and future potential. This is highly relevant to further inform the candidate – and the hiring manager and HR – about how to design the best possible work situation, now and going forward. Looking at someone's Growth factors can help guide decisions about e.g. future career paths, how to craft a person's current role, and how to help them thrive at work.

The growth factors are divided into two different sections: Drivers and Culture Preferences

The Drivers describe the person’s most prominent motivations, i.e., the driving forces that make them feel energised and engaged. Having a work setting that is aligned with one’s drivers is an important factor to create motivation and a sense of meaningfulness at work.

Culture Preferences list the type of environments that the person is most likely to thrive in. Different personalities tend to prefer different team cultures, since these can be more or less in line with one’s typical way of functioning. When the culture aligns with your personality, it tends to bring out the best in you.

The basic premise behind the science behind Growth Factors is that a five-factor personality test result is very rich. As you already know, personality is related to job performance, but it's also related to a number of other phenomena. Personality impacts our motivations and the environments in which we tend to thrive. These are the findings that we have leveraged to create our Growth Factors.

Personality and motivation: The background to Drivers

The section called Drivers comes close to what is usually called motivation. In psychology, motivation is a very broad concept, usually defined as a force that increases our propensity to act in a certain direction (see e.g. HERE). Motivation at work is determined by a host of different factors, many of which are external to ourselves: Rules, policies, incentives, social pressure, leadership, etc. But it's also well-established that our long-term motivation is influenced by personality. This is not so strange when you think of it: For example, a person with high conscientiousness continuously shows a stronger motivation to perform well, and a person with low extraversion is more motivated to seek opportunities for solitary work.

In other words, Alva is not suggesting that motivation is completely determined by one's personality. We do claim, however, that personality is one important piece of the puzzle, and can help you gain better insight into why you prefer the tasks or roles you do.

For the construction of Drivers, we conducted a literature review of studies looking at the relationships between personality traits and work-related motivators. We particularly looked at the strengths of the validity coefficients, to know how strongly certain traits related to certain motivators. We then translated these findings to a mapping between our own personality traits and a number of different motivators, that we chose to call Drivers. A key study included in our review can be found HERE.

Personality and Culture Preferences

It's well-known from the research tradition called Person-Environment Fit that different people tend to thrive in different environments. A key part of that environment is organizational culture. Again, there are multiple factors determining whether a certain individual will appreciate and develop well in a certain culture. Again, however, personality has turned out to be one of the important factors.

For the creation of Culture Preferences, we did another literature review. What's challenging about this line of literature is that it uses many different, but related, terms and concepts. Therefore, we started rather broadly, looking for studies that examined e.g. the relationship between personality traits and different work values or dimensions of organizational culture. The studies that were deemed relevant were kept in the review, and we compiled their key findings as well as the validity coefficients. Once the findings were assembled, we did a similar mapping to our personality test as described with Drivers above.

Want to learn more about how to use Growth Factors? Find more information HERE.