Business-Focused Inventory of Personality (BIP)

The UK standardisation was carried out in 2007 under the direction of Professor John Rust. The result is a practical, work-based questionnaire that is valuable for use at senior managerial levels.

The self-report questionnaire (Form S) is complemented by a version of the questionnaire that can be completed by others (Form O). This provides a useful insight into the impact of behaviour on other people and, as such, makes for a rich source of information in a development setting.

The questionnaire includes fourteen scales arranged into four conceptual domains:

Occupational Orientation – assessing work-specific motivation, this domain considers what motivates respondents in planning and shaping their career path and what they value in a job. There are three scales:

• Achievement Motivation (AM) - Willingness to tackle problems and the motivation to make strong demands on one's own performance; readiness to invest strenuous effort; motivation to continuously improve one's own performance.
• Power Motivation (PM) - Motivation to change something that is seen as needing improvement; readiness to influence things and to follow up with one's own ideas.
• Leadership Motivation (LM) - Motivation to exert influence in a social situation; preference for leadership and management tasks.

Occupational Behaviour – assesses the typical approach to work and focuses on three specific aspects:

• Conscientiousness (CO) - Carefulness of work habits; trustworthiness; attention to detail; preference for a structured, systematic and well-thought out approach; proneness to perfectionism.
• Flexibility (FL) - Readiness to take on new or unexpected situations and to tolerate uncertainty; openness to new perspectives and methods; acceptance of change.
• Action Orientation (AO) - Willingness to transform a decision into a goal-oriented activity; readiness to protect a chosen course of action from diversionary proposals.

Social Competencies – this domain describes the style of interacting with other people and contains five scales:

• Social Sensitivity (SS) - Capability to pick up subtle signals in social situations; capacity for empathy; confidence in one’s own interpretation of the behaviour of others.
• Openness to Contact (OC) - Readiness and preference for initiating contact with people; the active building and maintenance of both work-related and private relationships and networks.
• Sociability (SO) - Preference for the type of social relations that are characterised by friendliness and respect; generosity towards those who are less sociable; wish for harmony with others.
• Team Orientation (TO) - Value placed on teamwork and co-operation; readiness to actively support team processes; willingness to sacrifice one’s own interests for the benefit of the work group.
• Assertiveness (AS) - Tendency to dominate in social situations; persistence in striving to achieve goals even against resistance; sensitivity to interference.

Psychological Constitution – this domain seeks to describe how the demands made by a range of tasks at work, impact on a person's resilience and experience of emotional pressure. The three scales of this domain are:

• Emotional Stability (ES) - Degree to which emotional reactions are balanced and not volatile; capacity to recover from defeat and failure; capacity to control one’s own emotional reactions.
• Working under Pressure (WP) - Confidence in one’s ability to be highly resilient and robust; readiness to take on heavy work loads.
• Self-Confidence (SC) - Emotional independence from the judgment of others; self-motivation; confidence in one’s own capacity and expected performance.

In addition, the BIP has an ‘Impression Management’ scale which assesses an aspect of the test-taker’s approach to the questionnaire and enables the user to obtain, to some extent, the extent to which respondents are emphasising more or less positive aspects of themselves.

The supplementary Observer-Rated Version (Form O) is a short 42 item questionnaire which can be used by observers to rate the test-taker on the 14 dimensions of the BIP. For the sake of time efficiency, in Form O, each BIP dimension is addressed with just three items. Form O has not been normed as a metric in its own right. It is exclusively a reference or support tool which provides some useful information about divergence between self-image and public image which might be discussed in coaching conversations or in team development contexts.