iWAM, reviewed

TL;DR

iWAM, Reviewed: The Other Metaprogramme Instrument

  • Declared interest: iWAM and Sariio share the metaprogramme ancestry - so it gets the standard scrutiny, applied in full.
  • 48 parameters, 200 statements, work-focused rather than personality-focused: the design instincts are serious.
  • No independent peer-reviewed validation was locatable; the striking claims are all publisher-published.
  • A 45-65% performance-prediction claim would outperform almost everything in the selection literature - it needs a published study.

Disclosure, before anything else: iWAM and Sariio MAPS draw on the same intellectual tradition - work preferences read through the metaprogramme lineage - and compete for some of the same customers. That makes this review the opposite of disinterested, so it follows the same rules as every instrument review in this series: the publisher's own claims, quoted; the published record, searched; the criteria, in the open; the verdict, yours.

Most instruments in this series measure personality and hope it predicts work. The Inventory for Work Attitude and Motivation belongs to a smaller family that starts from the other end - measuring how people are motivated at work, specifically - and its ancestry runs through one of the more interesting side-channels of applied psychology.

What is the iWAM test?

The Inventory for Work Attitude and Motivation is an online questionnaire from jobEQ, developed by Patrick Merlevede, that measures 48 parameters of workplace motivation and thinking style. It descends from NLP metaprogrammes via Rodger Bailey's LAB Profile - patterns in how people are motivated, process information and relate to work, detected through language. The publisher reports 200 embedded statements, administration of 25 to 45 minutes, availability in more than 18 languages, and norm groups by region. It is used mainly for recruitment, coaching and sales training.

The lineage

What are NLP metaprogrammes and do they have evidence behind them?

Metaprogrammes are patterns in how people process information and motivate themselves - towards or away from goals, options or procedures, internal or external reference - identified within neuro-linguistic programming in the late 1970s and condensed by Rodger Bailey into the LAB Profile for business use. As observations about working preferences, several map onto constructs trait psychology measures well. As an evidence base, NLP itself has fared poorly under review - Witkowski's 2010 analysis found most rigorous studies failed to support its tenets - and the metaprogramme layer specifically has almost no peer-reviewed validation literature of its own.

The lineage deserves stating fairly, because it is partly ours. Leslie Cameron-Bandler and colleagues identified some sixty metaprogramme patterns in the late 1970s; Bailey compressed them into fourteen practical categories; Shelle Rose Charvet's Words That Change Minds carried them to a business audience. The patterns themselves are often shrewd observations about working style - the towards/away-from distinction, options against procedures - and several parallel constructs that mainstream psychology measures under other names. The difficulty is that the tradition mostly skipped the validation stage: NLP's broader research record is poor - in Witkowski's review of the most rigorous studies, a majority failed to support its claims - and the metaprogramme layer has generated case lore rather than journals. An instrument built on this ground can still be built well. It simply has to do the psychometric work itself, in public.

The publisher's claims and the search for evidence

jobEQ's materials make confident claims: that "accurate research is our priority", that "several universities have been working with us on the validation of the tool", that on average people agree with 90% of their reported patterns, that scores at one-month retest stay within 5% for most patterns - and, most strikingly, that "iWAM can predict 45 to 65% of the actual work performance of staff".

Is the iWAM scientifically validated?

We could find no independent peer-reviewed validation study of the iWAM in an academic journal. The reliability and predictive claims in circulation - including test-retest stability and a claim that it can predict 45 to 65% of actual work performance - trace back to the publisher's own documents, and that predictive claim would be extraordinary by industry standards, where validity coefficients above 0.5 are rare for any selection method. jobEQ states that universities have worked with it on validation; published, citable results of that work were not locatable in our research.

Put the 45-65% claim in context. A century of selection research, synthesised in Schmidt and Hunter's famous reviews, finds even the best single predictors - work samples, structured interviews, ability tests - explaining well under half of performance variance. An instrument genuinely predicting 45 to 65% of work performance would be the most important discovery in the history of personnel selection, and the study demonstrating it would be the most cited paper in the field. If that study exists, it is not where studies live. The likelier reading is that the figure means something looser than the validity coefficient it evokes - which is precisely why claims of this kind belong in journals, where the definitions are checked.

To be equally clear about what we did not find: no independent study refuting the iWAM either. The record is not negative; it is thin - publisher documents, reseller pages repeating them, and a norm-group paper on an academic file-sharing site. For an instrument two decades old, the silence is the finding.

The verdict is yours

The criteria this series applies do not bend for kinship. A work-focused instrument with a preference-pattern model is, we would argue, the right kind of instrument - that conviction is why Sariio exists. On the evidence standard, the two part company by choice: Sariio publishes its methodology and evidence base for exactly the scrutiny this review applies, keeps its claims inside what its data supports, and treats the survey as a living reading - retaken at least twice a year, on continuous scales, with no verdicts on people. Readers weighing the two should apply the same tests to both: what does the publisher claim, where is the independent evidence, and does the instrument expect people to change? The shared ancestry is set out in what are work preferences; the standards themselves are in are personality tests pseudoscience.

Judge the criteria for yourself, instrument in hand - the individual survey is free.

Sources