The Project Management Leadership Assessment The pilot we are currently running to look at leadership and how it may be measured for Project Management practitioners has a great by-product in that it also gives us a view on how socially desirable respondents measure when completing the test. The SD score or cheat score as it is known to some, is used to test validity of the result in terms of the individual within the group. So, what is social desirability? According to the web, ** “Social desirability is the tendency of respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others, or in a manner in which they believe the researcher would desire, rather than how they truly feel or believe.” We saw a great example recently where a test taker received their PLQ Result and presumably didn’t like what they saw. Shortly after, the test was retaken and resulted in a considerably different outcome, (presumably one that the test taker was looking to achieve?). However they also moved their social desirability sore to the maximum mark of 25/25 which immediately flagged the result as suspect. This all relates back to the “looking in the mirror” question, which I raised in the last edition of Project Management Tipoffs and how we approach this very difficult task of self-analysis

Continued here:
Need to be Socially Desirable?