The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a questionnaire designed to measure the psychological preferences that shape how people perceive the world and make decisions. The original developers of the personality inventory were Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. They began work on a questionnaire during World War II to help women who were entering the industrial workforce as part of the war effort to understand their own personality preferences and use that knowledge to identify the jobs that would be best for them. That initial questionnaire grew into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which was first published in 1962. The MBTI focuses on normal populations and emphasizes the value of naturally occurring differences between people.
MBTI personality types
The dimensions of the MBTI are seen here, along with temperament descriptions associated with each personality trait.
MBTI Defined
The MBTI sorts psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or dichotomies, resulting in 16 possible psychological personality types. None of these types are good or bad; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that societies as a whole naturally prefer one overall type. In the same way that writing with the left hand is hard work for a right-handed person, people find that using their opposite psychological preferences is difficult, even if they can become proficient by practicing and developing those different ways of thinking and behaving.
The 16 Personality Types
The 16 personality types are typically referred to by an abbreviation of four letters—the initial letters of each of their four type preferences. The four type preferences are: Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judgment vs. Perception.
One possible classification of a personality type is ESTJ: extraversion (E), sensing (S), thinking (T), judgment (J). Another example is INFP: introversion (I), intuition (N), feeling (F), perception (P); and so on for all 16 possible type combinations. In this situation, extroversion means "outward turning" and introversion means "inward turning." People who prefer judgment over perception are not necessarily more judgmental or less perceptive; they simply prefer one over the other. The most common combination from the Myers-Briggs test is ISFJ or Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, and Judgment.
The current North American English version of the Myers-Briggs test includes 93 forced-choice questions. Forced-choice means that the individual has to choose only one of two possible answers to each question. Myers-Briggs tests are frequently used in the areas of career counseling, team building, group dynamics, professional development, marketing, leadership training, executive coaching, life coaching, personal development, marriage counseling, and workers' compensation claims.
Relevance to Management
One of the most common contexts for using the MBTI is team-building and employee personality identification. Managers are tasked with creating work groups and teams with a variety of human resources, which is a complicated social process of intuitively estimating who would complement who in group dynamics. The MBTI test is an excellent tool to measure and more accurately predict how individuals will interact in a group and what types of skills they may bring to the table.
One particularly good example is in the IE relationship. Understanding which employees in a team are naturally introverted is a useful way to ensure that a manager doesn't miss out on these employees' opinions just because they are naturally quiet. The manager could meet with them privately and informally—over coffee, for instance—and get their opinions. Similarly, knowing which members tend to be intuitive thinkers (NT) and which tend to understand emotions and be observant (SF) can lead the manager to give them very different tasks, though the two might work well together in a group setting since they balance each other. Management can use this tool to minimize conflict and optimize performance.