This article applies the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) to the prediction of the rated performance of junior officers in the U. S. Coast Guard. The study uses Harrison Gough's recently published structural scales or vectors for the CPI and contrasts the predictive validity of the structural scales with that of the original scales based on folk concepts. For 85 graduates of the U. S. Coast Guard Academy's class of 1986, performance during the first two years following graduation was summarized in an overall rating derived from regular, semi-annual effectiveness reports. CPI vectors calculated from data that had been gathered during the summer of 1982 effectively predicted leadership performance and provided some support for Gough's typological cuboid model of personality. While the structural scales offered a relatively compact description of personality, several of the individual folk scales, notablyDominance, performed as well as or better than the structural scales as predictors of the performance criterion. The implications of the results, both for the use of the CPI and for the utility of the higher-order personality constructs represented by the structural scales, are discussed.