The review in the Times this weekend of Merve Emre’s new book What’s Your Type provided yet another opportunity to ‘have a go’ at the MBTI. In an attempt to redress the balance Meyler Campbell Faculty Member and psychologist Penny Moyle has written a fascinating blog on the usefulness of the tool.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is probably the most popular personality assessment used in business coaching and personnel development, taken by millions every year. Yet, it is also the most highly criticised in the academic literature on personality assessment (e.g. Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2007; Emre, 2018; Furnham, 2008).
When I was first introduced to the MBTI as a doctoral student at Oxford University, my first inclination was to join the MBTI sceptics, knowing that there were many more accurate personality measures available, much better suited to the kind of research work I was doing. However, as I moved into the world of business psychology and L&D (learning and development), I came to appreciate the power of a simple model with strong theoretical underpinnings. Frequently the work I became involved in would use the MBTI alongside more detailed (and ‘academically respectable’) trait-based measures. Time and again, I noted that it was the MBTI that my clients gravitated to and benefited from. It continues to be the personality framework that I use in my coaching, 25 years on.
Most academic personality psychologists appear to believe that personality assessments should be evaluated against a ‘one size fits all’ set of criteria. Their experience and focus is on developing and using the most accurate available measures, with a tendency to determine their validity as the ability to predict various outcomes, ‘predictive validity’. When it comes to business applications, there is a good body of evidence about the prediction of job performance. This is enormously helpful if you are choosing an assessment for use in an employee selection process, and has resulted in significant improvements of practice in that realm (Barends et al. 2014).
However, what this perspective and the associated body of research neglects, is that when the goal of using an assessment is the growth and development of the test taker, as opposed to the measurement needs of the employer, researcher or consultant, then the way in which we evaluate assessments needs to take into account some different validity criteria. There has been much less research with this focus, not least because it is rather more difficult to undertake, as the causes are multifactored and the outcomes difficult to quantify (Athanasopoulou & Dopson, 2015). Given the limitations of the academic literature in this respect, L&D practitioners including business coaches, have needed to take a broader view of the appropriate evidence to consider in choosing an assessment. It is not that they/we need better education as to what ‘good assessment’ looks like (which is the sense one gets from much of the literature). The choice of simpler and more focused measures such as the MBTI reflects a wider range of evidence taken into consideration, albeit a lot of it being more informal than the academic literature.
In a new paper, just published in the Journal of Personality Assessment, John Hackston and I use the MBTI as an example to demonstrate how many of the criticisms frequently made are either unfounded or misguided. Additionally, we introduce the new concept of ‘experiential validity’, the extent to which an assessment achieves the desired outcome for the test taker. We call for more research on this previously neglected aspect of validity. Such research could bridge the divide between the fans and sceptics, and enhance evidence-based practice in L&D.
We need to recognise that all personality assessments are merely tools in the work that we do. So, you need to choose the right tool for the job at hand. What works brilliantly in a selection context may have very limited utility in coaching and development. Even the most accurate assessment is unlikely to achieve the desired learning outcomes if it is too difficult to grasp, remember or use. I love what the MBTI can do to raise self-awareness and drive personal growth, but I would never use it to predict performance or as a part of a selection process; there are many better tools in my kit I would use for that.
Athanasopoulou, A. & Dopson, S. (2015). Developing Leaders by Executive Coaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barends, E., Rousseau, D. M. & Briner, R.B. (2014). Evidence-Based Management: The Basic Principles.
Amsterdam: Centre for Evidence-Based Management.
Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Winsborough, D, Sherman, R.A. & Hogan, R. (2016) New talent signals: Shiny new objects or a brave new world? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9 (3), 621-640.
Emre, M. (2018). The Personality Brokers. the Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Doubleday.
Furnham, A. (2008). HR Professionals’ beliefs about, and knowledge of, assessment techniques and psychometric tests. International Journal of Assessment and Selection, 16, 300-305.
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