THE ALPHA SCALE

We developed the Alpha Assessment over the course of three separate testing sessions, involving 1,646 research participants, each of whom responded to over two hundred questions. The questions were designed to tap into ten constructs: strengths and risks for alphas overall, and strengths and risks for each of the four types: Commander, Visionary, Strategist, and Executor. Participants also completed a series of supplemental assessments, including measures of Type A Personality, dominance, need for closure and anxiety [1]. 

The final version of the questionnaire, based on these cumulative efforts, consists of 120 items and yields standardized scores for each of the ten categories. The supplemental data presented in this Appendix are based on our third and final scale validation sample, which consisted of 1,523 readers of Harvard Business Review.

Table 1 shows the degree to which each assessment subscale related to the others.  More specifically, we show the correlation coefficients (Pearson's r's) among the various subscales [2]. As shown in the table, there was a moderately strong positive relationship between the General Strengths and General Risks subscales. That is, the higher people scored on General Strengths, the higher they tended to score on General Risks. This pattern confirmed one of our basic premises: Those who are gifted with alpha assets are likely to also be vulnerable to alpha liabilities.

Table 1 also shows that General Strengths was strongly positively correlated with Commander Strengths, Executor Strengths, Strategist Strengths, and Visionary Strengths. Similarly, General Risks was strongly positively correlated with Commander Risks, Executor Risks, Strategist Risks, and Visionary Risks. Thus, those who show relatively healthy traits overall tend to score highly on the Type Strengths subscales, while those who show relatively unhealthy traits overall are prone to high scores on the Type Risks subscales.

Table 1

Inter-Subscale Correlations

Table 2 shows respondents' mean scores for each of the ten subscales (all measured on scales of 1-5), as well as gender differences across each of the subscales. Males received slightly higher scores than females on both General Alpha Strengths subscale and General Alpha Risks. While these differences were small, they were also highly significant statistically.

Males also received higher scores on each of the four Type (Strengths and Risks combined) subscales. Notably, the gender difference was highly statistically significant for the Commander and Strategist subscales, but not for either the Visionary or Commander subscale. The Strengths and Risks Type subscales told a similar story: Males received higher scores across all of these subscales, but the male-female difference was only statistically significant about half of the time. Specifically, males scored significantly higher than females on Commander Risks and on both Strategist subscales, but the gender difference was non-significant in all other cases.  

Table 2 [3]

Means and Standard Deviations for Alpha Strengths and Alpha Risks, by Gender [4]