ABSTRACT
The author reflects the development of the Occupational Personality Questionnaires (OPQ), one of the most important developments in workplace assessment. The original OPQ was designed to be suitable for use by psychologists and HR professionals in selection, development, counselling, management assessment, succession planning and team building. The research project to develop the OPQ was probably the largest of its kind ever undertaken and was influenced, improved and adapted by the active involvement of the 50 sponsoring organisations, which gave us access to extremely large trialling groups. The OPQ was possibly the first omnibus personality questionnaire which was comprised of both normative and ipsative formats. With the impact which the OPQ had, it was not surprising that one would receive both plaudits and criticism. Although there has been concern about the use of ipsative personality measures recent research has shown that normative and ipsative versions of the OPQ display very similar psychometric properties.
