The Myers Briggs Personality Assessment Tool - 1249 Words

The Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment Tool Background The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® (MBTI ®) tool has an extensive and prestigious history, which leads to its tremendous success today as the world’s most commonly used and recognized personality tool. Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, developed the MBTI tool in the 1940’s. The inspiration to start researching personality type theory began when Katherine first met the future husband of Isabel, Clarence Myers. Further inspiration came from Carl G. Jung, a renowned Swiss psychiatrist, whose theory of psychological types proposed that people are inherently different in terms of who they perceive the world and take in information as a basis for their decisions.†¦show more content†¦MBTI ® scores indicate how specific preferences are reported in the questionnaire. The test does not measure skills or ability but is used as instrument to help understand a person better. Characteristics of the MBTI ® include: †¢ Managing staff: What are an individual’s likely strengths? For which role is this person best suited? †¢ Guiding careers: What kinds of jobs or positions will an individual find most fulfilling? †¢ Improving interpersonal relationship: How can a person best relate to and communicate with other personality types for maximum understanding? †¢ Developing education and training: What kind of teaching methods should be used to ensure all personality types profit from the presented information? †¢ Coaching and advising people: What can be done to help individuals understand themselves better and identify their strengths and weaknesses? Businesses often use this test to identify differences between individuals. These differences in turn, are the source of misunderstanding, which then leads to miscommunication. There is no doubt that MBTI ® is successful as a product, however, Dr. Dean Burnett of the Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neuroscience at Cardiff University is critical of the test. He says the test relies on poor scientific foundations and suspects the test is a self-fulfilling phenomenon – the more people take it, the