The Occupational Personality Questionnaires, OPQ or OPQ32, are widely-used occupational personality questionnaires

Personality test

-Overview:There are many different types of personality tests. The most common type, the self-report inventory, involves the administration of many questions, or "items", to test-takers who respond by rating the degree to which each item reflects their behavior...

. The authors were Saville

Peter Saville (psychologist)

Peter Saville is a British Chartered Occupational Psychologist involved in Talent Management who is well-known for his work in psychometrics.He earned his Ph.D...

 et al., including Roger Holdsworth, Gill Nyfield, Lisa Cramp and Bill Mabey, and they were launched by Saville and Holdsworth Ltd. in 1984. The series included the first commercially-available Big Five

Big Five personality traits

In contemporary psychology, the "Big Five" factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which are used to describe human personality....

 instrument.

OPQ32 provides an indication of an individual’s preferred behavioural style at work; to help employers gauge how a candidate will fit into certain work environments, how they will work with other people and how they will cope with different job requirements. It is now available in more than 30 languages and uses item response theory

Item response theory

In psychometrics, item response theory also known as latent trait theory, strong true score theory, or modern mental test theory, is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and scoring of tests, questionnaires, and similar instruments measuring abilities, attitudes, or other variables. It is based...

 to shorten the questionnaire down to under 30 minutes.

The OPQ32 is used in selection, development, team building

Team building

Team building refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance...

, succession planning

Succession planning

Succession planning is a process for identifying and developing internal people with the potential to fill key business leadership positions in the company. Succession planning increases the availability of experienced and capable employees that are prepared to assume these roles as they become...

and organisational change. Independent reviews are available online.