has anyone ever had this in the workplace? good or bad idea? is it something HR could use against you if you score badly?

you cant score badly on a myers-brigg test.

I found the test quite insightful.

There is no right or wrong answer with the test and you can not score badly, you just score differently to other people.

shockingly accurate 4 locus assessment based on 50 banal questions
well validated
related sites give links to similar locus combos + relative strengths + vulnerabilities of each pattern

shockingly accurate 4 locus assessment based on 50 banal questions
well validated
related sites give links to similar locus combos + relative strengths + vulnerabilities of each pattern

In english!?

It means that you can see how your own characteristics match against other people’s in your team. Ideally, a project team should aim to have a balance of characteristics blah blah blah…

“test” in many ways is a daft name for it – a “survey” or “study” would be better. It’s to give you insight, it can’t “measure” you as such.

Rachel

If you want monkeys, pay peanuts.

If you want trained monkeys, run a “Psychological Questionnaire”…

It is really useful but alot of the more common ‘types’ (as in frequent) don’t take it seriously enough to understand or hold anything against you. I’m gonna predict you as an ISTP.

loads of stuff on Wikipedia about it, search for MBTI

When I did one in my old job, I found it useful to understand what essentially made “other people tick” at work… I was quite a strong ENTP (google it) and as such, struggled to see what parts of my character traits would upset others, but also how and where I particularly excelled.

Very useful exercise for helping to select teams with differing/contrasting personality types. Or conversely, can just confirm that you’ve got a room full of people that piss each other off for various reasons on a regular basis! 😉

Key issue is it can’t be used for making decisions about staff either whether to hire or promote as it’s not valid for this. It’s accurate because it’s self report on the basis of preference. If you lie then it won’t be accurate.

It’s quite a simple thing really. Not terribly sophisticated but very widely used and it’s great for getting things you already know about others but don’t know how to talk about onto the table.

Have done this as a team build.was interesting as showed up similar personalities in each team.also showed me up as a misfit:) did not work well for me as only did the first bit and needed to do more detailed tests for me to get a proper benefit I think

Its a bit like those books about NLP entitled ‘The power of NLP’.

The idea is that the knowledge of your types creates an interesting observation on the interactions of the team, although the truly insightful observations come from peoples reactions to the tests IMO.

Some people really believe in it. Be aware that people change all the time and in different scenario’s so not totally true. Like Jam Bo says, no such thing as a bad result.

Besides which, in the spirit of ‘Everybody Counts’ all employees should be allowed to make a valuable contribution to the organisation as everybody has their own special qualities

I found it interesting and useful as it gave me a better insight to how other people think, compared to how I think (or not). Assessment would be a better word than test.

I found it about as accurate as a horoscope

INTP – so I am going to think about it 🙂

myers and briggs were a mother and daughter team. Myers, the mother, had no qualifications but a load of personal theories about personality types and collected findings (quality or impartiality not known) to base a book on. This book was read by medical health professionals and they all said ‘ah yes this is a simplified version of Yung’s theories’ Briggs then built some more evidence and bolstered. An american company figured out how to sell this to other companies and did so.

Besides which, in the spirit of ‘Everybody Counts’ all employees should be allowed to make a valuable contribution to the organisation as everybody has their own special qualities

Agreed. All MBTI does is draw out those qualities so everyone else can understand them and, if possible, make best use of them within a team. I’ve had it used on me several times and it has helped the team understand each other better and who has what aptitudes for certain tasks.

It’s a useful tool for confirming everything you despise about HR people.

Sounds like something that would be used on government projects, the ones where deadlines and costs don’t really matter. Every project I’ve been involved with has the team selected on people’s skills, knowledge and their available time, not garbage about character traits.

TooTall – you’re an MBTI? That’s impressive! I’m an ENTP. As you might have guessed.

I think it’s useful and interesting.

Turns out there are other people just like me. That was reasuring 😉

Found out I am an INTP 10 or so years ago then surprise surprise last year it turns out that, like a high percentage of the relatively small INTP group (3%), I am AS.

Everyone must have seen this , the ultimate in team building.

Yes – and we all giggled like school kids when the “facilitator” started talking about my bosses personality being down to his “P-ness”

We did de bono’s hat too – management consultancy tosh twaddle nonsense – IMO.

We did it and were then asked to do 4 tasks based on the 4 traits, some were designed to suit one type, others we were split into 2 groups and given the ‘wrong’ task/instructions for our type, others we were in groups and given the right instructions/task.

e.g. making a baloon dog, there were 2 sets of intructions one very conceptual and one ordered 1-2-3-4-5-6, out of a room of 20 engineers we didn’t manage a single one when each group was given the wrong instructions, swap instructions and we emptied the bag of baloons in 5 minutes!

I’m ENTP so a series of isntructions 1-2-3-4-5 (e.g. a hayes manual) make no sense to me, tell me to disconect everything and drain the fluids from the block and hoist the enegine out and I’ll have no problems however.

I found it about as accurate as a horoscope

There is no ‘predictive validity’ for Myers Briggs because it’s not trying to predict anything, it’s merely a self report tool for preferred style of behaviour, which is why you can’t use it for decision making.

Just for your entertainment, the ‘predictive validity’ (correlation coefficient) of a horoscope for job performance is about 0.5; the PV for basic interviews (i.e. not competency based interviews) is about .2 (which is basically what a lot of companies use; pretty p**s poor really). For competency based interviews it’s about .35; for psychometric tests (cognitive ability, work related personality but not MBTI etc) it’s about .3.

Put them all together and add in a simulation or work exercise and you can get up to .7.

It’s a useful tool for confirming everything you despise about HR people.

Or for confirming everything you despise about closed minded, arogant, engineering types who think that the only valid answer is the one they came up with 😉 So I guess you’re something like an ISTJ then.

Nothing to fear from MBTI.
It can only do you some good in terms of you understanding your own traits and how/why others might see things differently.
You’ll recognise something about yourself and possibly learn to recognise characteristics in others that you can play to.

Also gives you a framework to understand why some people tend to p!ss you off.

Stereotypical ISTP here. (and suspect there may be a quite a few of us on here)

INFP here – one thing I saw had a little stick man picture to illustrate my personality “type”

it showed a man in a hammock, day dreaming about baqs of gold – which seemed pretty spot on to me.

once I was supposed to do that “falling back/trust” exercise and got partnered with the MD, who was reluctant to take part to begin with. Naturally I stepped aside and let him fall to the floor. His humiliation and anger were a picture, I mentioned he should have trusted his initial instincts as they have proved correct so far. He didn’t quite know how to take that, calmed down and went off to play with someone else 😀

once I was supposed to do that “falling back/trust” exercise and got partnered with the MD, who was reluctant to take part to begin with. Naturally I stepped aside and let him fall to the floor. His humiliation and anger were a picture, I mentioned he should have trusted his initial instincts as they have proved correct so far. He didn’t quite know how to take that, calmed down and went off to play with someone else

Brilliant! But I suspect it falls into the ‘career limiting factor’ sub-category of brilliant.

Tell me, were you thinking of the classic Peanuts sketch when you decided on your strategy? You know the one where Lucy holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick and then pulls it away every single time?

I did the Johnny Briggs test. Turns out my dog is called Razzle.

Doesn’t it have quite a high level of unreliability – where if people do it twice, they get different results?

People love the MBTI, same as they like horoscopes, because pretty much any of the personality types will sound like they say something positive about you, and the descriptions are vague enough to sound accurate enough for most people.

We’ve done (administered) some of these personality test things for work relating to thrill / excitement (Big 5 mostly – which I understand is a bit better validated, but less popular amongst MBA types), and whilst they have some interest from a research point of view, I think people are crazy using them for anything as important as sorting out teams for doing a job.

Personally I think it is all part of a simplistic type of management that insists on masses of measurables, arbitrary targets that distort how people work and using a load of dehumanising but supposedly scientific measures to back them up.

When I did it a few years ago I came out as a strong INTP and I note that a few other posters up above are the same as well.

Joe – you make some good points.

Doesn’t it have quite a high level of unreliability

It does hence why you can’t use it for decision making. Having said that what you will find is that the general profile will be more or less stable but the degree to which you demonstrate a preference for one aspect may change.

It’s also very easy to manipulate the results once you know something about the areas it is measuring, i.e. you can give idealised answers for say a preference for Judging versus Perceiving.

the descriptions are vague enough to sound accurate enough for most people.

Sort of but the descriptions are themselves based on the big five to some extent. The Big Five are well established in psychology terms but on their own they have little relevance to a work setting. You can’t use standard personality test to inform decision making for an industrial setting unless you’ve done extensive work to examine correlation coefficients betweeen specific aspects of personality and performance in an industrial setting.

[/quote](Big 5 mostly – which I understand is a bit better validated, but less popular amongst MBA types)

MBA graduates and undergraduates alike will not have the faintest idea as to any of this subject. It’s not typically taught on MBA programmes (speaking as an MBA grad myself). Indeed, two weeks ago I covered this whole subject in a half day workshop I delivered to MBA undergrads at Manchester and none of them had any idea about the material I was covering.

I think people are crazy using them for anything as important as sorting out teams for doing a job.

You can collect data that can be used to inform quite important decision making, but you need to be far more sophisticated in what you collect and how you use it.

Personally I think it is all part of a simplistic type of management that insists on masses of measurables, arbitrary targets that distort how people work and using a load of dehumanising but supposedly scientific measures to back them up.

Well, perhaps. That is a very cynical view, and I can understand where you’re coming from if that’s been your experience.

On the other hand, I have seen it used very positively and to the benefit of both the company and the individuals, especially where it is used to acknowledge the differences between people and allow them to accept each others’ individual style.

GeeTee – Am I misreading, or did you actually suggest horoscopes as a valid factor in measuring job performance back there?

GeeTee – Am I misreading, or did you actually suggest horoscopes as a valid factor in measuring job performance back there?

No I said they have a correlation coefficient of about 0.05 – oh hang on, I said 0.5! I meant 0.5% 😯 In other words, utterly useless!

Yes, horrorscopes are pretty good at predicting on the job performance 😆

not really a point in the

‘career limiting factor’

having had long and drawn out meetings with the FD it was pretty clear the company spending was going to be that, I thought it pertinent to demonstrate that no-one would be able to catch him when he fell especially as spending the money on it was his idea 😀

and yep, it did have a bit of a peanuts feel to the whole thing 😀

While the personality types may hold true, to test based on our own self view is totally flawed.

While the personality types may hold true, to test based on our own self view is totally flawed.

Yes and no – self report can be a perfectly valid way to collect the data but you need to have a mechanism for corroborating how honest people have been.

There are a number of ways of doing this, ranging from the relatively simple – asking the same question a number of different ways to check consistency of response – through to the more sophisticated – asking questions that reflect traits that no one actually has but which sound appealing. It’s hard to explain or give examples of this but they are effective.

The report will then tell you whether you can rely on the data or not. It doesn’t say that this is an honest person or a dishonest person.