Fire & Rescue Service LJI

FIRE & RESCUE SERVICE, FRS-LJI

The Fire and Rescue Leadership Judgement Indicator (FRS-LJI) is a sector-specific situational judgement test designed to assess how leaders in Fire and Rescue Services decide how to lead across a range of realistic operational and organisational scenarios. It was created through a partnership between Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service and Formula 4 Leadership Ltd, to reflect modern leadership demands across prevention, partnership working, people leadership, and service improvement, not simply incident command. 

What gives the FRS-LJI its technical strength is that it is not a collection of “stand-alone” scenarios. It is built on the Leadership Judgement model that underpins all other LJIs and a set of research-informed leadership principles, translated into a structured sequence of up to ten Yes/No Leadership Judgement Questions (covering task and people factors). This underlying algorithm was used as a disciplined design protocol to craft the scenarios as “pure types” representing the model’s eight decision-making sub-styles, and to strip out redundancy so that each scenario contains only the evidence needed for accurate judgement.

The instrument was developed through an iterative, practice-anchored process (including focus groups, repeated drafting and redrafting, online piloting and item analysis), and then normed with a substantial cross-service sample (including respondents from multiple UK Fire and Rescue Services).  ? Its evidence base also includes criterion-related (concurrent) validity work: after completion, respondents provided structured self-ratings of their real-world leadership preference and judgement in the language of the model, enabling direct comparison with FRS-LJI scores. The reported pattern of correlations is consistently in the direction predicted by the theory, lending support to the instrument’s practical credibility for both selection and development contexts. 

A further strength of the FRS-LJI, as a member of the wider LJI family, is the programme’s unusually strong approach to internal consistency. Situational judgement tests can look weak on traditional reliability indices because they sample diverse situations, but the LJI family addresses this by analysing consistency at the level of the underlying “units of judgement” (the paired comparisons embedded in each scenario) in a way that matches how the instruments are actually constructed and taken. The FRS-LJI's internal consistency, estimated using the paired-comparisons (“units of judgement”) method, is strong for the four leadership styles, with alphas of 0.78 (Directive), 0.80 (Consultative), 0.75 (Consensual), and 0.79 (Delegative), and similarly robust for the orientations, notably Control (0.82), Involvement (0.78) and Empowerment (0.75), with Task still creditable at 0.67.   

The FRS-LJI is available from Hogrefe.