DISC style percentages: a review of 91 Korean studies and two student samples

DISC sorts behavior at work and in communication into four styles. mind.io calls them Decision (D), Influence (I), Steadiness (S) and Conscientious (C); the Korean papers below call D Dominance. After taking the test, it is natural to wonder whether your style is a common one.

A review of 91 DISC papers published in Korean journals from 2004 to early 2019 sums up the shares they reported as converging at 35% Influence, 27% Steadiness, 20% Conscientious and 18% Decision (Lee, 2019). Two student samples whose full tables can be checked look quite different, though: among nursing students, Steadiness made up 48.5%, close to half, while among comics and animation students Influence came first at 41.7% and Steadiness was only 10.0%.

This guide sets out the figures from the review and the two samples, the shares other studies found, what to keep in mind when reading the numbers, and how they differ from a result on the mind.io DISC test.

Lee (2019) gathered 91 papers on DISC behavior styles published in Korean journals from 2004 to early 2019 and summarized whom they studied, with which tools, and what they found. According to the abstract, 87% were empirical studies that collected data, and university students were the most studied group, followed by office workers and healthcare staff, among others.

The abstract states that the DISC style shares in these papers converged at Influence (I) 35%, Steadiness (S) 27%, Conscientious (C) 20% and Decision (D) 18%. With an even split each style would have 25%, so Influence comes out somewhat more common and Decision somewhat less.

The abstract does not say, however, whether these figures are a simple average of each study’s shares or were computed by adding up participants. And since university students were the most studied group, the shares are best read as a rough picture of the people who took part in Korean DISC studies.

The first sample is fourth-year nursing students at one university. In October 2015 and 2016, questionnaires went to 205 students who had finished a simulation course, and 198 were analyzed after 7 incomplete ones were set aside (80.8% women). Steadiness made up close to half, with 96 students (48.5%), followed by Influence at 33.8%, Decision at 10.6% and Conscientious at 7.1% (Kim, 2018).

The second sample is 120 first- to third-year comics and animation students at two four-year universities, one in the Seoul area and one in the provinces, surveyed in January 2017 (68.3% women). Here Influence came first, with 50 students (41.7%), followed by Conscientious at 26.7% and Decision at 21.7%, while Steadiness was the least common, with 12 students (10.0%) (Kim, 2017).

Both studies used the Korean DISC version of the Korea Educational Consulting Institute. The nursing study states that for each of 24 items, students picked the one of four adjectives that described them best, and the style picked most often was counted as their type. The table below shows the shares from the review and the two samples side by side.

The two papers also cite other studies. The nursing paper notes that another study of nursing students found Influence the most common, at 54.0% (Y. H. Lee, 2015), and that a study of nurses found Steadiness the most common, at 41.6% (Roh and Shin, 2015). The comics and animation paper cites a study of high school boys and girls where Influence was also the most common, at 45.9% (Baek, 2007).

So among nursing students alone, Steadiness took close to half in one study and Influence more than half in another. Kim (2018) also concludes that the distribution of DISC styles varies with the characteristics of the people studied. It is fair to say that Influence often comes out common in Korean student samples, but not that every group shows the same order.

Neither sample is representative. The first comes from one university and the second from two; women made up 80.8% and 68.3%, and all are university students, so the age range is narrow. Each study surveyed a single department and did not compare departments, and people choose a department for their own reasons, so the gap between the two samples is hard to read as “this major, this personality.”

DISC looks at behavior shown in a given setting rather than inborn personality, and the comics and animation paper also notes that the same person may show a different style in a different situation. When only the most-picked style sets a person’s type, people whose top two styles came out close are counted under one style. When reading your own result, too, the gap to your second style says more than the top style alone. We have not yet found a DISC distribution in a representative sample of Korean adults whose source and sample can be checked.

The mind.io DISC test is a test of its own in which, for each of 24 work situations, you pick the one of four actions closest to you. The number of items and the way of choosing are similar to the short Korean version in the nursing study, but its items are situation sentences written separately rather than adjectives, so the shares cannot be compared directly. Your result shows each style’s share of all your answers.

The DISC style ranking anonymously counts only the top style shown first in the results of people who tap the join button on their own result page. All that is sent is the test, the result and the page language; no answers or scores. The numbers count entries, not people, and the ranking stays hidden until 30 entries are in.

Q. What is the most common DISC style? A. In the review of 91 Korean papers, Influence (I) was the most common, at 35%. In the nursing student sample, though, Steadiness (S) came first at 48.5%, so the shares are better seen as depending on which group was studied.

Q. Which style is the rarest? A. In the review, Decision (D) was the least common, at 18%. Conscientious (C) was the rarest among the nursing students, at 7.1%, and Steadiness (S) among the comics and animation students, at 10.0%. Coming out rare does not make a style special or problematic.

Q. Why do the shares differ by department? A. Each study surveyed a single department, so neither compared departments or tested why they differ. The reasons for choosing a department, the schools and the survey dates all differ, so it is hard to conclude that a major sets one’s personality.

Q. Why does the mind.io ranking differ? A. The questions and the people differ. The two sample studies counted students gathered at their schools; the mind.io ranking counts the results of people who chose to join.

References: Lee (2019), DISC Behavior Style Research in Korea: Trends and Challenges (in Korean), The Journal of Learner-Centered Curriculum and Instruction 19(12), 277-294, https://doi.org/10.22251/jlcci.2019.19.12.277; Kim (2018), The Effect of DISC Behavioral Style on Nursing Student’s Knowledge and Clinical Performance (in Korean), Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society 19(11), 60-67, https://doi.org/10.5762/KAIS.2018.19.11.60; Kim (2017), A study of DISC Behaviour Patterns on the satisfaction difference of Comic-Animation Department students (in Korean), Cartoon and Animation Studies 47, 217-239, https://doi.org/10.7230/KOSCAS.2017.47.217.