MBTI: Personality Affecting Performance

1. MBTI: Personality Affecting Performance Jill Middleton & Ron Brassell

2. Overview • History • MBTI • Relation to Five-Factor Model • Life Satisfaction • Manager Preferences • Application • Ethical Use • Reliability & Validity • Limitations & Criticisms

3. History • Based on Carl Jung’s ideas about perception and judgment and personality typing • Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Briggs developed an “indicator” for people to describe themselves in Jung’s model • Assumes that people have preferred methods of perceiving the world, making judgments, forming attitudes to reflect their orientation of energy, and their orientation towards others.

4. MBTI • Purpose: Identify people’s basic preferences pertaining to perception and judgment, through self-report of easily identifiable reactions • Different versions ranging from 96 – 290 forced choice questions • Assumes our personality can be broken down into four independent bi-polar scales • Energizing: Extroversion – Introversion • Attending: Sensing – Intuition • Deciding: Thinking – Feeling • Living: Judgment – Perception • 16 possible personality types

5. MBTI • Energizing • Extroversion: Seeks engagement with the environment and gives weight to events in the surrounding world • Introversion: Seeks engagement from one’s internal thoughts and feelings, and gives weight to concepts and ideas • Attending • Sensing: Interested in facts, what is real, observable, and practical • Intuition: Interested in imagination, future possibilities, and implicit meanings

6. MBTI • Deciding • Thinking: Make rational decisions through objective and logical analysis (cause/effect) • Feeling: Make rational decisions by weighing personal values of alternatives • Living • Judgment: Prefer moving quickly toward decisions, organization, planning, and structure • Perception: Prefer spontaneous decisions and open to changes

8. MBTI • You are almost never late for your appointments. Y N • You enjoy having a wide circle of acquaintances. Y N • Strict observance of the established rules is Y N likely to prevent a good outcome. • You trust reason rather than feelings. Y N • You spend your leisure time actively socializing Y N with a group of people, attending parties, shopping, etc. • You usually plan your actions in advance. Y N • Your actions are frequently influenced by emotions. Y N • You are a person somewhat reserved and distant in Y N communication.

9. Relation to Five-Factor Model • McCrae & Costa • Intuition – Openness to Experience Sensing – More closed • Feeling – Agreeable Thinking – Antagonistic • Judging – High in Conscientiousness Perception – Low in Conscientiousness • Five-Factor model, which is based on multiple theoretical perspectives, may be a better perspective for interpreting the MBTI • Jung’s theory: construct validation problems • 5-Factor: each of the four indices showed strong evidence of convergence with 1 of the 5 personality dimensions

10. Relation to Five-Factor Model • Jung’s Theory: • Thinking: intellectual activity in which judgments are based on rational applications of principles • Feeling: assignment of value (acceptance or rejection) to objects of experience • A person whose first reaction to experiences is a judgment of rejection (e.g., mistrust) but without a logical basis would be classified as a Feeling type by Jung, but would probably score low on the MBTI Feeling preference. • Jung’s Thinking/Feeling preferences focus on different modes of experience and might be more related to aspects of Openness.

11. Life Satisfaction • Es – higher psychological well-being and life satisfaction than Is • Ns – higher psychological well-being than Ss • Ns prefer to see things as they could be rather than as they are. • Ss – higher social anxiety than Ns • Ss prefer predictability and demonstrated commitment in relationships • Overall, Es, Ns, and Ss reported higher levels of psychological well-being than their counterparts.

12. Manager Preferences • Thinking and Judgment are most common among managers • Implies that certain types of people self-select for administrative positions • Top managers are predominantly Intuitive. • Middle and lower managers are predominantly Sensing. • Suggest Intuitive managers engage in strategic planning more frequently and effectively than Sensing managers.

13. Application of the MBTI • Career Counseling • Teaching • Group Dynamics • Training • Marketing • Personal Development • Executive Coaching • Learn to Type-Watch coworkers

14. Ethical Considerations of the MBTI • Voluntary basis only • Confidentiality • Indicates types not traits • Never for selection of employees. • Strengths and weaknesses vary with the shadow functions, people can change, learn and adapt. • Never humiliate others in a negative way. • There are no right and wrong answers to the test. • Proper feedback should be given.

15. Reliability • Test/retest results show variations in the reported type, depending on the number of months between testing. • 50% of participants remain the same within 9 months of testing. • Low reliability on children and the elderly. • Lacks falsifiability and can lead to confirmation bias.

16. Validity • Lacks scientific scrutiny • Prone to socially desirable responses • Vulnerable to faked responses. • Lacks double-blind testing for validity • Factor Analysis shows 6 factors instead of 4 • JP and SN scales have been shown to correlate with each other.

17. Limitations • Values and motivations are not measured. • Pathology is not measured. • Sane and insane can have the same dimensions. • The dimensions are not measured. • How competently do you feel, think or judge. • Forced choice prohibits the shadow functions. • Can cause stereotypes to be misplaced and misunderstood.

18. Criticisms of the MBTI • Jung’s theory of psychological type were not tested through scientific studies. • Modern psychology rejects the base components of introspection and anecdotal thoughts. • Neither Myers-Briggs nor Jung supported their theories with proof of existence, sequence, orientation or manifestation. • CPP Corp suspected of “protecting” the MBTI.

19. Questions?