John and All: Here goes any remaining credibility, but anyway .... I read McCrea and Costa (1989) when it came out (!), and it gave me a sort of appreciation for MBTI. As I recall, I-E maps to (correlates with) I-E, Intuition to Openness to Experience, Thinking-Feeling to Agreeableness, and Judging-Perceiving to Conscientiousness. Maybe Myers and Briggs were genius lay people, decades ahead of their time in capturing (partially) 4 of the 5 Big Five. The fifth, neuroticism, was not much use to their pitch that "it takes all kinds" and "it can be good to be on either end of a dimension." I find some of the MBTI test manual or equivalent information to be either incomprehensible or implausible, but if I ignore most of it and think of MBTI as largely Big 5, I have something believable (to me) to say about MBTI to students and managers who of course have been exposed in droves. For example, again as I recall, supposedly Thinkers believe that the fair way to make a personnel decision is by the book; Feelers are more contingent on the particulars of the situation, believing that contingent approach to be most fair. I can see a greater degree of agreeableness in the latter approach. Moreover (really sticking my neck out now), a correlation of .40-something between Thinking-Feeling and Agreeableness does not, in itself, invalidate MBTI for the way it is used (and it might be better for its uses than Agreeableness, if its specificity and thus face validity for its application is greater, and users will believe its applicability).
If anyone knows about "team diversity" research that has looked specifically at MBTI diversity and team performance, that would be interesting because of the link to the central claim accompanying MBTI that "it takes all kinds." (If no one knows about such research, that's rather interesting, too.) Research may exist to show differential MBTI scores across occupations, or other MBTI associations, but that's the sort of matter in which the overlap of MBTI and Big 5 is especially problematic (why say it's the specifics of MBTI and not the broader or deeper Big 5 driving those associations?).
And no, I don't run MBTI workshops!
Regards, John
John L. Michela, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
PAS Building, Room 4025
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave., W.
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada
519.888.4567 x32164
jmichela@uwaterloo.ca
From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of John Antonakis
Sent: February 4, 2011 11:56 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] MBTI classroom exercises
Hi:
This is a note about the MBTI and not the exercise. Although the MBTI model is used a lot in practice and by tons of consultants (as well as educators) the model and the supposed "types" have been severely criticized in the psychometrics literature. See:
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the Perspective of the 5-Factor Model of Personality. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40.
Pittenger, D. J. (1993). The Utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Review of Educational Research, 63(4), 467-488.
Stricker, L. J., & Ross, J. (1964). An Assessment of Some Structural-Properties of the Jungian Personality Typology. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 68(1), 62-71.
Zaccaro, S. J., & Horn, Z. N. J. (2003). Leadership theory and practice: Fostering an effective symbiosis. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(6), 769-806.
FYI, I used the Web of Science to search for "mbti" or "myers-briggs" in three top OB journals ("journal of applied psychology" or "personnel psychology" or "organizational behavior and human decision processes") and in "academy of management journal" and did not find a single hit.
Anyone wanting to demonstrate evidence for the validity of the types nowadays would have to show some kind of latent class analysis (or finite mixture modeling) predicting some kind of outcome (e.g., teamwork, leadership, etc.); I don't think that anyone has published such evidence though I might be mistaken. Perhaps I need a reality check. Does anyone know of a top-notch psychology journal that regularly publishes papers that uses the MBTI using the MBTI "types" as predictors (and having found evidence, using latent class analysis or something similar, that the types exist)?
HTH,
John.
__________________________________________
Prof. John Antonakis
Faculty of Business and Economics
Department of Organizational Behavior
University of Lausanne
Internef #618
CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny
Switzerland
Tel ++41 (0)21 692-3438
Fax ++41 (0)21 692-3305
http://www.hec.unil.ch/people/jantonakis
Associate Editor
The Leadership Quarterly
__________________________________________
On 04.02.2011 17:07, Andreas Richter wrote:
Dear colleagues,
Apologies for cross-posting.
I am looking for classroom exercises for an Executive MBA OB course (average age: 36 years) on the MBTI. Students hold middle to high level management positions in their organizations. Students will have completed the MBTI prior to the class on "teamwork", and I am looking for a group exercise where I can split the class into breakout groups based on their profiles. This exercise should provide students with insights on how their MBTI profile affects the way they work in teams, or handle conflict in teams, or how team composition based on MBTI profiles affects teamwork.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated (will provide a summary of suggestions and post them back).
Many thanks in advance, and kind regards,
Andreas
Andreas Richter, Ph.D.
Judge Business School
University of Cambridge
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 339639
Fax: +44 (0) 1223 339701
Email: a.richter@jbs.cam.ac.uk
Web: http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/research/faculty/richtera.html