Since its creation by mother-daughter team Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test has taken an increasingly dominant place in work-related psychological assessments.
Carl Jung’s theory of Psychological Type was very popular in the 1940s. At that time, Myers and Briggs saw a connection between Jung’s archetypes / personality types and a person’s suitability for various professional roles. The test they created was actively geared towards personnel selection.
This intuitive connection has been shared by thousands of test administrators, psychologists, HR professionals, and brand managers.
Heresy Warning!
Unfortunately, and these words will be considered heresy in some circles, the research doesn’t fully support this intuitive connection. For years, the MBTI has been used to funnel individuals into one of 16 categories, based on theoretically contradictory traits such as Thinking vs. Feeling, Judgement vs. Perception, and Introversion vs. Extroversion.
Despite updated research into the fallibility of personality tests, however, almost 90% of Forbes 100 companies use the MBTI test with their employees.
Lack of Reliability and Validity
While it can be useful to understand an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, it can seem a little bit like reading your horoscope. Answers seem to be related to your current mood or position, not your core psychological structures.
Repeating the test on a different day and time will likely yield another result. While MBTI spread like wildfire through countless institutions, from churches and schools to conglomerates, it remained widely ignored by the field of psychology for exactly this lack of reliability and validity.
That is, until they began to study just how meaningless much of MBTI’s results are.
Inaccurate, but Cheaper than Valid Alternatives
While a test might seem like an efficient way to evaluate an employee’s strengths, it isn’t sufficiently accurate to use for making major decisions.
Good staff will have been needlessly lost to MBTI, while less valuable candidates will have been promoted. A far more reliable option is to observe staff at their day-to-day tasks and watch how they manage different aspects of their work.
Work samples and simulations, job knowledge tests, cognitive ability tests, and integrity tests are other methodologies tht are far more useful than Myers-Briggs testing.
The popularity of Myers-Briggs is clearer when you consider that individual, in-person evaluation, carried out over a period is very resource-hungry compared to a snapshot via a self-administered test that yields instant results.
Bias, Contradiction, and Credibility
Employers should also take into account that a candidate may feel the need to answer the test according to their employer’s wishes, as opposed to answering honestly.
The binary choices of MBTI questionnaires cannot properly reflect human complexity. Nor are they opposites. In the test, there’s no room for someone to be both thinking and feeling, despite decades of research and experience that shows duality is more common.
There are also startling omissions. The MBTI cannot measure grit, compassion, competence or skill – all vitally important.
This may explain why there is very little evidence for links between MBTI findings and managerial efficacy.
Management following MBTI undermines its own authority by using tests that have been likened to using star signs for staff assessment.
Is it even necessary to carry out personality testing to understand your employees’ motivations and job productivity? The answer is a resounding “no.”
Use other tools to understand your candidates and employees. If you’re going to go to the trouble of assessing them, do it right, in a way that has meaning and will have lasting effects.