Marston's four styles: an old origin with little independent validation
The four behavioural styles model (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness) is widely used in companies. It traces back to a 1928 book, and peer-reviewed validation is limited.
Where the model comes from
In 1928 psychologist William Moulton Marston published "Emotions of Normal People". He proposed that ordinary people's emotions could be understood along two axes: whether a person sees the environment as favourable or hostile, and whether they feel more or less powerful in it. That yielded four patterns, which Marston called dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. Marston is also remembered for his blood-pressure experiments on lie detection and for creating Wonder Woman (Lepore, 2014).
Marston did not build a test. In the following decades others turned his ideas into adjective checklists for business use, with the labels that became popular: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness (or Compliance), known by the acronym DISC.
What the research says
Today there are many commercial versions of the model, each with its own items and manuals. Much of the reliability and validity evidence lives in the companies' own technical reports rather than in peer-reviewed journals. Some of those reports show good internal consistency, but independent studies are few and usually small.
The available studies suggest the four styles overlap with Big Five traits. Influence resembles extraversion; Steadiness, agreeableness; Conscientiousness, conscientiousness; and Dominance combines assertiveness with lower agreeableness (Jones & Hartley, 2013). That helps explain why the descriptions feel sensible: they touch real personality dimensions, just less precisely.
Uses and cautions
The model is popular in communication and teamwork training because it's simple and doesn't rank the styles. The main caution is not to use it to hire, promote or exclude people: there's no solid evidence that the profile predicts job performance.
Limitations
Ethea's test uses forced-choice blocks, the classic format for this kind of instrument, so it produces a relative profile among the four styles. With 12 blocks, each style rests on few choices, and close profiles may change on a retake. The test has not been validated in independent samples and must not be used in hiring.
How Ethea adapts the model
Ethea's version has 12 blocks of four adjectives or phrases, one per style; you mark the most and the least like you. The result shows your main and secondary style and the spread across all four, with communication tips. The texts avoid tying styles to job titles or to "better" professionals.
Test created by Giovanni Oliveira.
Ethea is not affiliated with any company that sells assessments based on Marston's model.
References
Links with a DOI go to the original article. Where no DOI is given, the link opens a Google Scholar search.
- Marston, W. M. (1928). Emotions of Normal People. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. / Harcourt, Brace. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Lepore, J. (2014). The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Alfred A. Knopf. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Jones, C. S., & Hartley, N. T. (2013). Comparing correlations between four-quadrant and five-factor personality assessments. American Journal of Business Education, 6(4), 459–470. Search Google Scholar(opens in a new tab)
- Hicks, L. E. (1970). Some properties of ipsative, normative, and forced-choice normative measures. Psychological Bulletin, 74(3), 167–184. DOI: 10.1037/h0029780(opens in a new tab)
- Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(3), 460–502. DOI: 10.1177/0013164410375112(opens in a new tab)
- Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2013). How IRT can solve problems of ipsative data in forced-choice questionnaires. Psychological Methods, 18(1), 36–52. DOI: 10.1037/a0030641(opens in a new tab)