TMS Research – Perspectives: Job Demand and Preference

With this post we are going to take a look at some data from two different TMS assessments, the Types of Work Profile (TOWP) and the Team Management Profile (TMP). The TOWP looks at what is perceived as the most critical work functions for success from the Types of Work Model in a specific role. The TMP looks at individual work preference.

The graphic below is from the TMS research from the TOWP and illustrates the perceptions of all raters in terms of what the % distribution is for each of the work functions for a senior management role. The n of 252 is a bit small but good enough for what we are looking at here.

The larger numbers represent the highest % and this case the 3 highest make up just over 51% of the total.  Yellow is the Promoting work function, pink is Organizing and light green Innovating.  However, with the exception of Producing (purple) and Inspecting (dark blue) the perception is that a senior management role contains quite a variety of performance needs in many of the work functions.

The next graphic is the preference distribution for senior management from the TMP research.

The numbers here represent the % of senior management people who have taken the TMP that have expressed major role preferences in the various areas of the Team Management Wheel (i.e. 29% of senior management people who have taken the TMP have expressed a preference for the Organizing work function).  The n here is 36,701 so a good sample size.

I am big proponent of context affecting preference and in a variety of other posts have asserted that I believe preference is primarily socially constructed, not innate, and it is these socially constructed patterns of behavior that the TMP is assessing.

Yet if you look at the two graphics above and have the perspective I do, you would expect the actual numbers in the graphics to be similar. For example if the expectation of the role (its context) contains 13.56% focus in the Maintaining work function (light blue) should we not see a preference distribution higher than a minuscule 1%?!?

So is my social construction perspective inaccurate?

In the next post I will offer my thinking but it would be good to hear what sense you make of the data above first….