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 [url=
, 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 [i]Johnny[/i] 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.
(Big 5 mostly - which I understand is a bit better validated, but less popular amongst MBA types)
I think people are crazy using them for anything as important as sorting out teams for doing a job.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 😀'career limiting factor'
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.
to test based on our own self view is totally flawed.
Yeah, I've always found these things difficult (maybe they should add that as a question...) because a lot of the time my answer would be borderline or situation-dependent. I'd, say, think first and then act if I was starting a software development project, but perhaps act first and think later if the building was on fire.
I also find it quite tricky to be objective when analysing myself, which I suspect is true for most people.
you need to have a mechanism for corroborating how honest people have been.
...
asking the same question a number of different ways to check consistency of response
See, I'd be inconsistent here. I've just done a noddy test online and similar questions worded differently solicited different answers, this is the context thing I was on about.
For instance, "You spend your leisure time actively socializing
with a group of people, attending parties, shopping, etc." - yes, I do. "Often you prefer to read a book than go to a party" - yes, I do. Contradictory? Dishonest?
The test I just tried was [url= http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp ]here[/url], incidentally. According to that I'm INTP, which (after reading on [url= http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html ]here[/url] what that means) is different to what I'd have said if asked cold; I'd have said ISTP, but I kinda tick both sets of N/S definitions to an extent.
I started that test, but quickly got sick of the stupidity of the questions.
It's not about honesty so much as it's about how reliable is the data you've generated.
Some people are impervious to such tests bceause they know them professionally and can anticipate their responses, others struggle with their answers, which sometimes does give an insight into their personality - for example they are indecisive!
The example you give is a good one but not one that is necessarily contradictory or dishonest.
For example, if these two questions were trying to get at whether you're introverted or extroverted, then if there were the only two questions on that subject and you answered positively for both, then the questionnaire might conclude that you were niether extroverted nor introvereted but actually some where in the middle.
Don't forget that the results of these things are never binary; you're never either 100% introverted or 100% extroverted. They score on a scale, relative to a sample group. If there were ten questions measuring this scale say, and you answerwed positively to 7 of them and negatively to three of them, then we might conclude you had a stonger preference for extroversion than introversion, but that still wouldn't make you 100% extroverted.
Does that makes sense?
I started that test, but quickly got sick of the stupidity of the questions.
Any of the ones you can find for free will be worthless crap. That's why they're free. The good ones have to be paid for.
I have been asked to do them at job interviews as well, and found the questions pretty much of the same level.
MSP it sounds like you're demonstrating a clear preference for meaningful data; are you an engineer of some form, either software or mechanical etc?
That might explain why you feel negatively towards something that you can't see the reasoning or mechanism behind. It's a classic 'sensor/thinker' style to hark back to MBTI!
Its questions like this-
[i]You believe the best decision is one that can be easily changed
YES NO[/i]
If a decision can be changed or not has nothing to do with it being wrong, right or "the best". Its a flawed question and these tests are filled with them.
If you can't see the reasoning, it might explain why you feel so positive towards something so fundamentally flawed.
Who wouldn't have a preference for meaningful data? Is there a demographic which says "yes, I'd prefer meaningless data, thanks"?
It doesn't say what you can/can't do, its a PREFERANCE, which is why you can score down the middle.
On the day I did the test iw as an ENTP, which is correct (IMO). But as you said above, its possible to have a preferance for partying as well as reading books quietly which could be seen as I or E.
Being one or the other isn't right or wrong, but it is good to understand what your preferances are and why that might really peeve others off.
If a decision can be changed or not has nothing to do with it being wrong, right or "the best".
Well then it's really very simple. Your answer is 'No', the best decision for you is defined as being something other than the statement given here, so it's not remotely flawed, it just doesn't describe your view of the world.
Any of the ones you can find for free will be worthless crap.
To be fair, I'm largely of the opinion that it's all worthless crap, free or otherwise. I only did it out of curiousity to see if it came up with anything resembling close. It's not a great leap of testing to go "do you like parties? You're probably outgoing then." It's like the "are you good in bed" questionnaires you get in intellectually devoid glossies like Heat and Zoo.
(... I imagine, obviously)
Try reading the question again geetee1972, instead of trying to bend it to fit your own view.
Unfortunately you have clearly bought into this, and even more unfortunately I fear you are in a position to force your beliefs onto others.
Who wouldn't have a preference for meaningful data? Is there a demographic which says "yes, I'd prefer meaningless data, thanks"?
Some personality types are comfortable with data that gives rise to ambiguity or gaps. For example, engineers tend to be uncomfortable with personality tests because the data is not 100% perfect and there can be levels of ambiguity and nuance that cannot be captured or reflected in the data.
If you can't measure and quantify the 'noise' then they tend to get flustered. On the other hand, certain personality types are OK with this.
Engineers are quite happy with ambiguity, but that's how they label it. They tend not to pretend its a new science.
For example, engineers tend to be uncomfortable with personality tests because the data is not 100% perfect
Garbage. As an engineer I work with datasets that are far, far less than 100% accurate. What is laughable about your defense of this sort of testing that your response to criticism seems to be along the lines of "well you would say that as you are obviously a type XXXX personallity" rather than addressing the valid criticisms that are being made.
I've done a number of these and always come out as INTJ - mastermind apparently 😉 . Not many of us around - 1 to 4%.
These tests may give [u]some[/u] indication of strengths and weaknesses, but I would say they are as useful as a chocolate fireguard for properly judging a person's character and in a work place context! They should be used in private by individuals, who want to learn a little bit more about themselves, almost as light entertainment.
The results can be rather ambiguous, open to erroneous interpretation and overall are really rather crude. I can't believe companies take them seriously!
Each scenario and how you respond to it in real life would vary, depending on a raft of variables, including how the said individual was feeling at the time.
The real danger is that some daft HR person/manager might take it too seriously and prejudice the future of the person who has taken the test.
One test I did described how people have "a mask". I.e. to what degree are they are allegedly putting on an act. Well, tell me how anyone can prove either way if someone is a political play actor? It's nonsense! What a test like this [i]does[/i] do is destroy trust. Stupid, given that the test is crude and unsafe!
One poster on here likened these to horoscopes. Whilst not quite so crass, I don't think they are a great deal different.
What is laughable about your defense of this sort of testing that your response to criticism seems to be along the lines of "well you would say that as you are obviously a type XXXX personallity" rather than addressing the valid criticisms that are being made.
Yep you have a point. I apologise.
What specifically is the criticism?
The criticism is that they are trying to apply simplicity and bureaucracy to complex ideas. It is akin to making judgements on bio diversity by driving your car down the motorway and taking a glance at the splats on your windscreen.
I'm an INTJ apparently.
The criticism is that they are trying to apply simplicity and bureaucracy to complex ideas.
MSP - OK that's an interesting argument. Tell me what you mean by the above statement; where is the simplicity (we can leave the bureaucracy to one side for the time being).
Be assured that I know something about this subject and I'm genuinely interested in what you're saying.
I'm an ENFP and I've never looked up what that transcribed to and to be honest it does pretty much describe me. It could be a coincidence.
I'm an ENFP and I've never looked up what that transcribed t
In real world terms it means you're about as nice a person to be with as one could possibly hope for.
Outgoing, sensitive to peoples' feelings, you don't tend to get hung up on details and you don't tend to get in a flap about deadlines.
We did one recently MBDI. It was a fun day, better than what I was working on. But a pointless exercise because the data will not be used to any effect. I already knew I was highly creative and not interested in rules. The most interesting result is that I get emotionally colder when stressed which i had not realised but is true.