What is behaviour intelligence?

What does behaviour intelligence measure?

It measures how often specific behaviours happen over a stated period. That is a frequency, and it can be answered by the person who did the behaving. The free KOZMO Behaviour Snapshot is built this way: 27 questions, a 7-point frequency scale, and no account. It shows your strongest behavioural tension across 9 of our 30 capabilities.

How is it different from a personality test, an engagement survey or a performance rating?

As categories, they ask different questions. A personality test describes a person's general dispositions, usually as a profile or type. An engagement survey asks how people feel about their work and is normally read as a group result. A performance rating is a judgement of output, usually made by someone else. Behaviour intelligence asks how often particular things are done, by whom, and where.

Why behaviour rather than type?

Because decades of research suggest that what people do depends heavily on the setting. Walter Mischel's Personality and Assessment (1968) started the person-situation debate by arguing that behaviour was less consistent across situations than trait scores implied. Mischel and Shoda (1995) later proposed that stable personality shows up as characteristic if-then patterns: a person acts one way in one kind of situation and another way in a different one.

William Fleeson (2001) reached a similar place from the data. He described a trait as a distribution of states, so the same person produces a range of behaviour, and which part of the range appears depends on context. In organisational research, Meyer, Dalal and Hermida (2010) reviewed situational strength: clear cues, consistent messages, consequences and constraints can restrict how far individual differences are expressed at all.

If behaviour moves with context, a label for the person misses part of the picture. A record of what happens, how often, in this job and this team, carries more of it.

What are the honest limits?

• The Snapshot is self-report. Paulhus and Vazire (2007) describe self-report as the most commonly used method in personality assessment and also a frequent target of criticism.
• KOZMO's measures are expert-designed and pre-validation. They are not normed, not peer-reviewed and not predictive.
• A single Snapshot covers one period and one person's view of it.
• Results are never shared with an employer.

How can I see what behaviour intelligence looks like for me?

Take the Snapshot. It takes one sitting and shows what stands out in how you work. If you lead a team and want a shared view, KOZMO Team is a founder-led Diagnostic that looks at presence and severity, and measures again later.

Where does this come from?

Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and Assessment. New York: Wiley.

Mischel, W. & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality. Psychological Review, 102(2), 246-268.

Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(6), 1011-1027. PubMed

Meyer, R. D., Dalal, R. S. & Hermida, R. (2010). A review and synthesis of situational strength in the organizational sciences. Journal of Management, 36(1), 121-140. doi:10.1177/0149206309349309

Paulhus, D. L. & Vazire, S. (2007). The self-report method. In R. W. Robins, R. C. Fraley & R. F. Krueger (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology (pp. 224-239). Guilford Press.