As part of the trend to reduce the costs of hiring many companies are turning to testing and assessment to validate their hiring decisions. Most prominent amongst these – maybe because they have been around so long – are DiSC and Myers Briggs (MBTI) based personality tests. Both are based on using paired adjective choices to determine personality traits. Neither of these are job specific, but they have been shoehorned into all sorts of versions to try and measure beliefs about what different jobs require.
It’s a bit like using a panel van to take the family to the movies and carry 20 tons of steel. Both tasks need a vehicle – the family need 4 seats and some comfort, a small turning circle and a heater. The steel needs an articulated truck. The only real similarity is they are vehicles Some Background DISC development began in the early 1900s when the US Army asked psychologist William Marston to investigate why different soldiers who received the same training behaved differently. He took 10 years to produce a report “Emotions of Normal People.”
Soon after publication an unknown psychologist used the theory of mental energy that Marston developed and produced an easy to administer pencil-and-paper test based on pairs of adjectives which were added together to produce scores for dominance, extraversion, need for security, and need for structure. Nothing about job behaviour anywhere and certainly nothing claimed as predictive of any behaviour – let alone job performance.
Still “When the only tool you know how to use is hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” That is, to many uninformed DISC users, every hiring problem looked like a DISC profile. And this hammer has been used on many nails – even one using devoutness as a measure !
MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s theories about psychological type preferences. Jung’s book “Psychological Types,” Myers and Briggs developed the tests and tested their work on friends and family during the 1940s in an attempt to resolve conflicts and help match people and work. MBTI classifies individuals along four dimensions according to how they seem to see the world
1. Energy; Extravert (likes to interact) / Introvert (prefers to concentrate)
2. Attention; Sensing – Focuses on Facts- Practical and methodical/Intuitive Focuses on possibilities, theoretical and leaps forward
3. Decision-Making; Thinking (T): Makes decisions believes in justice Feeling (F): Makes decisions based on desire for harmony. Believes in compassion.
4. Lifestyle; Judging (J): Proceeds towards goals in an organized way. plans and comes to decisions. Perceiving (P): Spontaneous. Likes to gather information and keep options open.
But, at the end of the day MBTI is a clinical tool that requires trained experts to interpret and make judgements. This is just too labour intensive, too clunky. It is also difficult to relate MBTI to a valid, predictive job performance
At the end of the day scores on personality tests are just not highly predictive of performance. As a simple example The drunk at the bar lurches from extraversion as his inhibitions disappear, but lurches into introverted concentration as he pours more booze into his system, probably past a little bit of dominance It’s all too fluffy …. It is bad science to pretend that either of these tests accurately predict managerial performance, or anything else especially sales performance
But hey quasi science is better than no science isn’t it?
As for us. We don’t pretend to know what works for Accountants, Architects or anything up to and including Zoologists. Except stopping at S we do know what works for Salespeople and Sales managers.
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The graph below (from CIPD I believe) indicates the relative accuracy of evaluation methods. I’m grateful to Sally Duff for challenging what I was saying about this. I imagine that we may continue to disagree about the sequence for pre hiring evaluation . She favours interview, evaluation, interview, I favour Evaluation interview, interview as this removes the fact that the interviewer has and will deploy their own prejudices. There is a place for interview, of course, but I believe that much of this is to do with personal fit
hiring-efficiencypptx
Hi,
I read your blog with interest, in particular your comments about the MBTI.
I’m pleased to be able to agree with some of the main points of this post: that the MBTI doesn’t predict job performance, and that it should not be used for recruitment.
In fact, neither of these are the *intended* use of the MBTI, so you’re quite right to say they would be unsuitable applications of something that is actually a very powerful developmental tool!
I do want to correct a couple of things though. Although you say that the MBTI determines “personality traits”, it’s actually a “type” instrument. Trait questionnaires usually measure several detailed patterns of behaviour, whereas type questionnaires aim to describe a whole character, making it possible to group people into just one of several different categories of personality. It’s quite an important distinction: to understand or predict job performance, you really need a breakdown of the specific behaviours that a person is likely to display, so this is where it’s a much better idea to use a trait instrument (such as the 16PF) to find a good match for these specific qualities.
The MBTI, by contrast, identifies which of 16 personality types respondents are most like. This gives people a broad and easy-to-remember personality description, ideal for understanding how they are similar to some people and how they differ from others. As a result it can help people develop in ways such as how to foster understanding of others and promote better communication and team-working.
Also, the MBTI is not a clinical tool. Though it does need to be used by people qualified to administer and interpret it, I’m pleased to say that it’s also widely available to help people understand their personality in the workplace, home-life and can be used in counselling.
Best wishes with your recruitment work!
Rob Bailey
Managing Consultant, Research and Development
OPP – European distributor of the MBTI
By: Rob Bailey on July 23, 2010
at 9:03 am
Rob, Thanks for the clarification. All these tools have a place and work in the right place. We do use a 16PF based tool for Key Management assessment and Gap analysis. For recruitment competency based evaluation seems to work best. And the recession seems to have reinforced that according to our predictive validation studies, now showing a 96% accuracy for hiring.
By: selltosuccess on July 29, 2010
at 5:20 am