Understand your style. Lead the people around it.
A self-administered assessment that profiles how you naturally operate, how you actually behave at work, and what the gap between the two predicts about your performance under pressure.
How this relates to other instruments you may know
The dimensions surfaced here overlap substantially with what MBTI, Insights Discovery, and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument measure. The patterns those instruments surface are real and well-established — we're working in the same territory.
The foundations are different, though, and that matters. Personality here is measured against the Five-Factor Model — the most empirically-validated personality framework in workplace psychology — rather than Jungian type categories. Conflict reads directly from the Blake-Mouton managerial grid that underlies TKI. The interpretation is then combined with one dimension the recognised instruments don't measure: the gap between who you naturally are and how you actually perform at work.
The stretch dimension — and why it matters under pressure
Under pressure, the role-mask collapses back toward natural disposition. An introvert performing an extraverted role doesn't become extraverted — they sustain a performance, and when stress rises, fatigue accumulates, or conflict erupts, the gap between performed style and natural disposition is where the strain shows, often visibly and at the worst moment.
Most personality instruments measure either who you are at rest or how you behave in role. They don't measure the daily energy cost of operating in a way that doesn't match your default — the stretch — and they don't predict which behaviours will hold and which will retreat when the pressure comes on.
It's how we perform, as well as who we natively are, that matters under pressure. The stretch reading in this assessment makes that gap visible before it shows up in a critical moment — so individuals and teams can design around it rather than be surprised by it.
Foundations
Personality items are adapted from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), measuring the Five-Factor Model (Costa & McCrae). Conflict behaviour maps to five modes derived from the Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid (1964) — concern-for-results × concern-for-people — the same two-axis foundation that TKI is built on. In research mode, an ego-state reading is drawn from Transactional Analysis (Berne, 1961), which adds a "voice under pressure" lens distinct from the personality and conflict layers. The synthesis — natural-vs-at-work stretch, individualised strengths and shadows, dimension-specific bridging guidance, and trainer-flagged combinatorial patterns — is Ad Astra Human Performance's own integration.
Choose a mode
What you'll get
- Your five-factor profile — your standing on Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability, with high-pole and low-pole strengths for each.
- Stretch profile — the gap between your natural disposition and how you actually behave at work; the dimension that predicts how you'll behave under pressure.
- Individualised strengths — the named strengths you actually scored on, drawn from your specific item endorsements.
- Shadow risks — for each strength you scored, the specific shadow it tends to cast on differently-wired colleagues.
- Bridging guidance — for each dimension where you score strongly, how to work with colleagues whose disposition differs.
- Conflict-style profile across five Blake-Mouton modes, read as a whole-profile pattern rather than just highest and lowest.
- (Research mode) Transactional Analysis ego-state profile and what it predicts about your voice under pressure.
- Trainer-flagged patterns — combinations of scores that warrant specific development conversations.
- Print-ready report and a shareable code for retaking or comparing later.