Myers-Briggs personality test: Pseudoscience, or good for business?
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All the big personality tests, whether it’s the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the DISC assessment, or the Big Five, exist to identify an individual’s motivations, preferences, and how they’re likely to interact with different people and to different situations.
For some jobs, certain personality traits and abilities are as essential as expertise and skill sets, but for all jobs, there are favoured personality traits.
If you’re facing customers, a friendly disposition is highly advantageous. If you’re working under any kind of public scrutiny, a thick skin is a prerequisite. If you work in sales, perseverance and an ability to handle rejection are must-haves.
Having the means to identify these desired or essential traits is essential in the hiring process, and in inventorying your employees.
Understanding personality tests
In its most simple guise, a personality test typically attaches multiple choice answers to specific personas, profiles, or personality types.
After answering a series of questions, participants are assigned one of these personality profiles based on which one the majority of their answers corresponded to, although the mechanics can sometimes be more complicated than this.
Depending on the specifics of the personality test you took, you might be assigned a “collaborator” profile, “ESTP,” or “8w7.” Your result would typically be accompanied by some more insight into said personality type.
Why are personality assessments popular in the workplace
Because you can literally use statistics to see people categorised into different roles, personality tests have been extremely popular in business – both from a hiring perspective in the field of psychometrics, and to help with promoting self awareness in career development.
A brief history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment
The MBTI personality test is the classic personality test, and it’s probably been taken by more people than any other.
It’s a self-report questionnaire that sorts participants into 16 distinct personality types. It does this by assigning binary values to the categories of introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving, with one letter from each category taken to produce a four letter test result.
Origins and purpose of the MBTI
Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers took the theory of the MBTI from Carl Jung’s book, Personality Types, which they deemed too complex for a general reader.
They initially began creating the MBTI during World War II. They believed that knowing their personality types would help women entering the workforce for the first time to find jobs most suited to them.
To this day, it’s completed by millions of people every year.
The MBTI’s popularity in business settings
Theoretically, by having a better understanding of an employee’s personality type, businesses are better able to create working environments where their people can succeed.
Additionally, from a recruitment perspective, it can – theoretically – give a more nuanced understanding of a candidate, in a way that goes beyond just their CV and experience.
Fundamentally, however it’s being used, it’s giving data points and attempting to categorise one of the most volatile and unpredictable aspects of industry: the human workforce.
Industry likes to contextualise and make sense of everything, so the popularity of personality tests for business was to some degree an irresistible state of affairs.
However, as to their validity, opinion is divided.
Criticisms of the MBTI
The root of the problem is that Myers and Briggs were not trained scientists with backgrounds in psychological research, and they also based the MBTI on a single source.
Another major problem is that it relies exclusively on binary choices, for example, that you are either extroverted or introverted, with no middle ground. This results in an incredibly simplistic and limited view of human personalities, and can be reductive.
It has also been shown to have low test-retest reliability (with a lot of participants retesting and getting different results), and has been cited as using terminology so vague that any kind of behaviour can fit any personality type.
Pseudoscience or practical tool?
So what’s the verdict? Is it actually any good?
The answer is “sort of” – the MBTI, and other well known personality tests being used across businesses can be useful IF you’re aware of their limitations.
Unfortunately, a lot of people using the MBTI aren’t aware of its limitations, and can take it as an infallible tool, which as discussed earlier, it is not.
They’re an attempt to take into account people’s personalities without making it personal. And that’s a peculiar area to get into.
But perhaps the biggest blocker to them being useful to you and to your business, is that they’re generic, and designed in a way that might be so broad for mass use, that they’re next to useless for your particular needs.
When you create a job advert, it’s specific to your organisation and your role that you’re looking to fill. You don’t use the same advert your competitor uses, so why would you use the same personality test?
Custom-designed tests to better serve your business’s needs
With Drimify, you can build a custom personality assessment tool using the personality test maker, designed specifically with your needs in mind.
You define the profiles or personality types, and you define the personality test’s questions and the answers, and how they all correspond.
You could base it on an existing personality test and tweak it to your requirements, or start from scratch if you have a good idea of what you need from participants’ responses to help you, whether that’s for hiring or for reflection and development.
Key takeaway when using personality tests for business
Whether you go using the MBTI or you build your own personality test, remember their limitations and use them as a guide rather than an absolute. They’re more like a leaf blowing in the wind as opposed to actual meteorological measuring equipment.
Essentially, what you see on a personality test could be used to inform interview questions or back up decisions based on face-to-face encounters with candidates. They should never be used in isolation in a way that’s acted upon.
It’s helpful, but it’s providing supplementary rather than primary information.
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