III. THE ORIGINS OF THE INFLUENCE STYLE QUESTIONNAIRE

Roger Harrison and David Berlew began to study power and influence by trying to
identify all of the ways people influence each other when they are in face-to face
situations. Focusing on situations where there was a goal to accomplish (rather than
people simply being sociable), Harrison and Berlew noted on index cards anything that
they believed was an observable behavior. The result was a large stack of cards, each
containing an observable behavior. They then asked other people to sort the cards into
piles containing similar behaviors. With repeated attempts using this “card sort
method,” the cards more or less fell into four piles. Harrison and Berlew labeled these
four categories of behavior as:

1. Assertive Persuasion
2. Reward and Punishment
3. Participation and Trust
4. Common Vision

Harrison and Berlew then developed a questionnaire, using items derived from each
one of these category stacks. They initially assumed that the four categories would not
be independent of each other (that is, the categories would be correlated), so no factor
analysis was performed on the questionnaire items. While this decision might be
debatable, Harrison and Berlew had reason to assume that people who used Assertive
Persuading (whose contemporary name is now “Persuading”) would probably be more
apt to use Reward and Punishment (now called “Asserting”). Similarly, people who
used Participation and Trust (now called “Bridging”) would probably be less apt to use
Reward and Punishment. They researchers did perform an item analysis ensure that
items used to measure one category (or Style) correlated more highly with the other
items in that category than they did with items used to measure other categories. They
even collected norms so that people could convert their personal scores into standard
scores. (In an early version of the Introduction to the PPIP, a one-day training program, the four raw scores were converted to standard scores.)

Over time, additional observation and research provided more clarity about key
behaviors or skills which made up each of the four Style categories. Harrison and
Berlew were able to differentiate, or “break out,” the four Style scores into ten
component behavior scores. Once again, they performed an item analysis but not a
factor analysis. They felt they had taken reasonable precautions in developing a
questionnaire, called the “Influence Style Questionnaire (ISQ)” that would be
sufficiently reliable for use by participants in a training program. The ISQ would allow
these participants to collect and use behavioral self-assessment data in conjunction with
data from other sources. Harrison and Berlew called these questionnaire-based data
“messages,” rather than measures, to emphasize their conviction that participants
should neither consider their ISQ results as unalterable, nor should they compare their
data to some behavioral “norm” or ideal.

Although Berlew and Harrison have always maintained that the ISQ was not designed carefully enough to be used for research purposes, a number of scholars have found the instrument useful for their research, and it has produced very interesting results. The ISQ was used at the University of Oregon quite successfully, proving to be reliable and valid enough to predict behavior.

In the early 1980s, Ruud van Ommeren from Bureau Zuidema, a consulting firm in The
Netherlands, did complete a factor analysis of the ISQ. Although he expected to find
that the Influence Style Model’s components led to undifferentiated factors, in fact the
results pointed to fairly separable dimensions (accounting for 34 percent of the
variance). His report was presented at our 1983 International Agent and Licensee
Conference in Florida.

In 1989, Sheri Feinzig and her sponsor, George Alliger, researchers at the State
University of New York at Albany, conducted a confirmatory factor analysis on the
1987 Third Edition version of the ISQ. Feinzig used as participants in her study
managers from a local and well-known high-tech manufacturing organization. These
managers were participating in an SMS negotiation-skills training program that used
the PPIP behavioral model and the ISQ instrument. She asked participants to complete
the ISQ as a self-rating, and to collect ratings from their subordinates as well. In
addition, they were to complete the ISQ as “actual” behavior and as “desired” behavior.
Feinzig’s factor analysis found that the ISQ’s validity was strongly supported for the
four-style model used by the PPIP Third Edition (accounting for 87-97 percent of the
variance). Interestingly, validity was higher for “desired ratings” than for “actual”
ratings, and the subordinates’ (respondents’) data on their managers fit better than the
managers’ (program participants’) data.

Van Ommeren’s and Feinzig’s research confirms and quantitatively documents
Berlew’s belief in the face validity of the ISQ. As SMS moves to a new edition of the
PPIP and the ISQ, new research on item analysis and instrument validity will be
conducted.