Personality (MAPS)

What does the MAPS (Mapwave’s Appreciative Personality Survey) measure?

In the MAPS, we map professional personality using the Big Five model, one of the most scientifically validated models in psychology.

The five main dimensions are:

Emotional stability – how resilient or sensitive you react to stress or setbacks.
Extraversion – how social, energetic, or reserved you are.
Conscientiousness – how structured, orderly, or flexible you work.
Altruism – how much you consider others versus your own interests.
Openness – how curious and innovation-oriented you are versus conservative.

Why include the MAPS in your test package?

The MAPS provides insight into stable behavioral preferences and the way someone tends to react in various situations. It helps you assess whether someone will fit the job context, team, and organizational culture.

Personality doesn’t tell everything about performance, but is often decisive for long-term behavior such as dealing with stress, collaboration or independent functioning, handling change or feedback, etc. This adds unique predictive value on top of, for example, a reasoning test or situational judgment test.

All questions in the test are specifically formulated for the professional context, making the test feel highly relevant and recognizable to candidates.

About the report

The report displays results across the 5 personality dimensions. Each dimension is further divided into subdimensions, allowing the profile to show much nuance.

For each subdimension, you receive a score, feedback text, and a completed core quadrant by Ofman:

Quality – a natural strength in your personality
Pitfall – the risk that this quality is used too strongly, causing it to overshoot.
Allergy – behavior in others that can strongly irritate you, often the opposite of your quality.
Challenge – the behavior you can develop to keep your quality in balance and avoid your pitfall.

This way, you don’t get a “right-wrong” story, but a nuanced, practical, and development-oriented view of the personality profile. This makes the report extremely suitable for recruiters as preparation for selection interviews. Additionally, this is naturally also suitable for self-reflection, coaching, and development conversations.

The results are displayed relative to a representative norm group, so you can put your scores in perspective. Response tendencies are also provided so you get an indication of the social desirability with which a candidate responded.

Recommended combinations with other tests

No single test perfectly predicts on its own how someone will function in a job. What you can do is smartly combine tests that each measure something different — so that you gather as much relevant information as possible, without unnecessary overlap or test fatigue.

This increases incremental validity: the added value of a test on top of the others.

Recommended combination with a personality questionnaire:

Reasoning test
→ measures cognitive abilities, such as abstract reasoning and learning capacity.
→ indicates what someone can handle in terms of complexity and pace.

Situational judgment test (SJT)
→ simulates concrete work situations and measures practical decision-making.
→ indicates how someone tends to act in typical job situations.

Through these combinations, you get a multi-layered and reliable overall picture: from capabilities to behavioral preferences to contextual behavior.

Application

The MAPS personality questionnaire is broadly applicable within selection and development.

Specifically, you can use it for:

Selection – get an objective and nuanced view of someone’s personality and behavioral preferences. This allows you to assess whether someone aligns with the role and organizational context, and adds reliable data points alongside interviews or CVs.
Self-insight – the connection with Ofman’s core quadrants makes strengths, pitfalls, challenges, and allergies concretely visible. Candidates or employees recognize themselves better and understand how their behavior is experienced by others.
Coaching and development – the insights form a powerful foundation for coaching trajectories and development plans. It clarifies where growth opportunities lie and how someone can more effectively deal with their own pitfalls and challenges.

This way, you turn selection and development from guesswork into a substantiated process that leads to targeted growth.

Big Five Model

Core Quadrants for development-oriented insight

Dutch, French & English

Suitable for all education levels

Self-assessment questionnaire

120 questions

Time: 15 minutes

Price per administration: €55

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SJT Social Skills

The SJT Social Skills measures how someone interacts with others in work situations: collaborating, communicating, and acting customer-oriented. Candidates are presented with 12 situations, each with five possible responses. Each response must be evaluated individually for appropriateness.

The test evaluates six core competencies:

Task-oriented collaboration – practical cooperation, making clear agreements, and sharing knowledge
People-oriented collaboration – considering others, constructively handling disagreements
Assertiveness – forming your own opinion and expressing it respectfully
Customer orientation – seeking solutions and appropriately handling challenging customer situations
Reliability – acting consistently and with integrity when dealing with information and people
Flexibility – handling changes and continuing to work efficiently

Social skills are decisive in virtually every job. They determine how well someone can:

collaborate within a team
interact with customers or external parties
communicate in challenging situations
adapt flexibly to changing circumstances

This SJT provides a realistic view of how someone makes choices in social interactions and shows whether those choices contribute to constructive collaboration, customer orientation, and reliability. This makes the test a valuable complement to personality tests and cognitive tests.

The report provides standardized scores (stanine 1–9) per competency, each with:

Feedback text – description of the current level
Development advice – concrete tips to strengthen the skill
Graphical score display – a visual overview of the results

This makes the report useful not only for selection, but also for coaching and development conversations.

The six competencies that are reported separately are:

Task-oriented collaboration
People-oriented collaboration
Assertiveness
Customer orientation
Reliability
Flexibility

No single test perfectly predicts how someone will function in a job. What you can do is smartly combine tests that each measure something different — so you gather as much relevant information as possible, without overlap or test fatigue. This increases the incremental validity: the added value of a test on top of the others.

Recommended combination with the SJT Social Skills:

Personality test (MAPS)
→ provides insight into stable behavioral preferences such as collaboration, empathy, and flexibility.
→ helps explain why someone makes certain choices in social situations.
Reasoning test (abstract, verbal, or numerical)
→ measures cognitive capacity: logical, verbal, and/or numerical thinking.
→ indicates what someone can handle in terms of complexity and learning ability.

Together, these tests provide a complete picture: from social skills to personality and cognitive strengths.

Selection: the test provides objective insight into how candidates behave in social situations. You get a reliable picture of their ability to collaborate, flexibility, reliability, customer-friendliness, and assertiveness. This improves the quality of your hires and reduces the risk of mismatches.
Learning & development: the test can serve as a baseline measurement at the start of training or education. You gain insight into the strengths and development points of participants and can tailor the learning path accordingly. With a later measurement, you can also see what progress has been made.

Measures collaboration, customer orientation, and flexibility in realistic situations

6 separate competencies with feedback and development advice

Dutch, French & English

Suitable for all education levels

Situational Judgment Test (SJT) – text-based

12 situations, each with 5 responses to evaluate

Time: Maximum 30 minutes

Price per administration: €55

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SJT Basic Competencies

The SJT Basic Competencies measures how someone handles everyday work situations in operational roles. Think of situations within the context of production, warehouse work, deliveries, maintenance, and cleaning. Through short videos, candidates are presented with recognizable situations in which they must make choices about how best to respond.

The test maps three basic competencies that are crucial for reliable and efficient functioning in the workplace: flexibility, collaboration and problem-solving ability.

Because the test works with video clips instead of text, it is also suitable for candidates who have difficulty reading or have limited language proficiency.

In many operational roles, flexibility, collaboration, and practical problem-solving are decisive for success.

The test is particularly suitable for roles where employees:

perform physical operational work with clear quality and safety standards
regularly need to collaborate and communicate with colleagues
must independently solve unexpected situations
work in environments such as production, logistics, cleaning, technical services, or transport

Because the test is administered through realistic videos, it better aligns with candidates who are less familiar with textual test formats. This increases engagement and measurement accuracy.

The test evaluates three core competencies:

Flexibility – how well someone adapts to changing circumstances and learns to switch when plans change.
Problem solving – the ability to deal pragmatically with difficult situations and take appropriate actions.
Collaboration – how constructively someone works with others and takes their needs and expectations into account.

For each competency, the report provides a standardized score (stanine) and concrete, understandable feedback text. Candidates also receive development advice, making the test a valuable foundation for learning paths or coaching.

No single test perfectly predicts on its own how someone will function in a job. What you can do is smartly combine tests that each measure something different — so that you gather as much relevant information as possible, without unnecessary overlap or test fatigue. This is how you increase incremental validity: the added value of a test on top of others.

Recommended combination with a situational judgment test:

Personality test (MAPS)
→ provides insight into stable behavioral preferences such as empathy, stress resistance, and flexibility.
→ helps explain why someone responds in a certain way in customer situations.
Accuracy test (Secondary)
→ measures accuracy under time pressure
→ indicates something about how carefully and thoroughly someone works when they need to check numerical, textual, or visual information.

In selection the test helps to get an objective picture of how candidates handle everyday but crucial work situations. This way you can quickly see whether someone possesses the fundamental competencies needed to function successfully within an operational context.
In learning & development the test can serve as a baseline measurement for new employees or when setting up a broader development program. You gain insight into strengths and improvement areas in basic skills, allowing you to better align training programs. A later administration makes it possible to visualize evolution and learning effects.

Directly measures observable work behavior focused on basic competencies in operational roles

Video format makes the test more accessible for non-native speakers or profiles with limited reading skills

Dutch

Suitable for secondary education level

Situational Judgment Test (SJT) – video format

9 situations, each with 4 responses to evaluate

Time: Maximum 20 minutes

Price per administration: €55

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360° Feedback

With our 360° feedback survey, you get a nuanced picture of someone’s performance from different perspectives: supervisor(s), colleagues, direct reports, internal customers, project members, and the person themselves.

You can start immediately with our standard 360°. This allows you to collect feedback on the following leadership competencies: strategy and vision, risk-aware analysis and decision-making, change orientation, results orientation, people orientation, leadership, networking and customer focus, collaboration, personal development capacity, and integrity.

Do you have a clear leadership vision within your organization? Then we create a survey based on our validated competency library. This way, we select precisely those competencies that are relevant to your organization and the purpose of the survey.

A 360° feedback provides insight from multiple perspectives. By combining feedback from different levels and roles in the organization, you get:

More complete picture – insight into strengths and development areas from multiple angles
Better development conversations – concrete and nuanced starting point for coaching or performance discussions
Greater self-awareness – reflection of self-image with external perceptions
Stronger development actions – thanks to concretely formulated improvement points and a ready-to-use action plan template

Because you can fully align the survey with your own competency model and context, this instrument is equally suitable for talent development, leadership development as well as for culture and behavior programs.

The report is clear, comprehensive, and action-oriented, with:

Global overview – spider web with average scores per competency
Benchmark – comparison with the average scores of other participants who simultaneously go through the same process
Scores per competency
Scores per behavioral indicator
Comparison self-image vs. others – insight into similarities and differences
Strengths & development opportunities – including concrete improvement points
Ready-to-use template for reflection action plan – for immediate follow-up in development conversations

Confidentiality is guaranteed: results are only displayed for respondent groups with at least 3 respondents (adjustable to a stricter limit, e.g., 5).

A 360° feedback survey is ideal in combination with:

Internal development actions within your organization
→ Use the results of the 360° as input for your leadership program, internal coaching, training, or development programs.
→ This way, insights are directly translated into concrete development steps and lasting behavioral change.

You use the 360° feedback survey within development and HR processes when you need a broad, multi-voiced, and reliable picture.

Specifically, you can use a 360° as:

Start of a development or leadership program – map strengths and focus areas clearly to work in a targeted manner immediately.
Competency map for training – determine priorities based on real needs.
Performance reviews – conduct a concrete conversation with clear observations and follow-up actions based on more than just vague memories.
Baseline and follow-up measurement – establish the initial situation and measure again later to objectively evaluate the growth and impact of a program.

Get a complete picture of someone’s performance

Dutch, French & English

Suitable for all education levels

Standard or custom survey

Concrete action plan template included

Price per administration: from €225

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Thema: Communication