Myers-Briggs Personality Test the Myers-Briggs

¶ … Myers-Briggs Personality Test

The Myers-Briggs Type Instrument

The Myers-Briggs Type Instrument (MBTI) is a psychological test that has been widely used throughout personnel management functions in modern business organizations since the early 1960s. In principle, it consists of describing personality tendencies through the relative dominance of various behavioral traits. More specifically, those traits are paired with their analogues as follows: extraversion/introversion; sensing/intuiting; thinking/feeling; and judging/perceiving.

The MBTI is considered a reliable predictor of leadership potential and it is most frequently used in connection with team building and with employee and management training programs at many professional organizations.

On the other hand, the test also suffers from several inherent limitations and weaknesses. Because of those weaknesses, it is inappropriate for use in connection with prospective employee evaluation and selection, primarily because it unfairly excludes many candidates without justification. To a large degree, awareness and understanding of those limitations and weaknesses is the most important tool for enabling users to minimize their influence as much as possible.

Team Building and Training

The MBTI has been used effectively to help employees improve their rapport in the workplace. In that respect, it can be implemented either in connection with efforts to improve mutual cooperation and operational productivity or in connection with more general employee training programs to foster an organizational climate of mutual understanding and cooperation.

Inherent Limitations

While the MBTI can be very useful when used appropriately, it suffers from at least four specific limitations: it does not measure personal values or motivation; it cannot distinguish between sanity and insanity; it provides no measurement of the quality of or personal proficiency in any of its characterizations; and (most importantly) it does not account for quality of or proficiency in the so-called "shadow functions" (i.e. those analogues that are not selected).

The inability of the MBTI to measure either the positive or negative associations beyond the mere selection of one trait over the other are its most serious limitations in the context of making them inappropriate for certain types of applications. To illustrate by example, a forced-choice test that requires the subject to select from the choice between "extravert" and "introvert" cannot distinguish between an individual who is more extraverted than introverted but only by a small margin and an individual who is tremendously extraverted.

Misuse for Employee Selection and Narrow Categorization of Coworkers