The MBTI Isn’t Predictive — And It Wasn’t Design to Be This Way
For decades, individuals and organizations of all types have used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) to help their members better understand and work with each other.
While the MBTI has remained one of the most popular and enduring personality-based tools used in organizations, it’s not the only kind of personality instrument. Alongside a cluster of tools focused on individual and team development, there are other models like the Big Five that are less popular for development but are used more often in academic psychology, research, and selection.
On the surface, the Big Five has some commonalities with the MBTI, notably the examination of facets of personality along dichotomies including introversion and extraversion. While there are some apparent similarities between these perspectives on personality, there are some fundamental differences that may help to explain how tools like the MBTI and the Big Five have settled into different domains.
Strengths and preferences
“Will you succeed at your job?” is a much different question than “how do you prefer to work?” Neither the MBTI nor the Big Five assesses practical ability, but unlike the MBTI the Big Five is predictive by design.
This allows it to be used for things like predicting performance in a given role and job selection — things the MBTI can’t be used for. Why not? Because the MBTI indicates a person’s personality preferences rather than describing how their personality will actually play out in interactions.
For example, a person with a preference for Introversion may prefer to work independently more often, but their goals and experience may have led them to build a strength for Extraversion in certain contexts — In the MBTI sphere, there’s no reason a person who prefers Introversion can’t be successful in traditionally extraverted roles like sales if that’s their goal.
Going below the surface of MBTI four-letter type also reveals that everyone has a mix of Introverted and Extraverted parts of their personality. This differs from models like the Big Five that view facets like Introversion and Extraversion on a continuum.
Focusing on preferences rather than traits or strengths, the MBTI is by design non-predictive. Unlike the Big Five, it can’t provide any insight into how happy or successful someone will be in a given role, but instead provides a common framework and vocabulary that helps individuals communicate how they prefer to work and interact.
Who’s asking?
When used by individuals, models like the Big Five can help develop well-rounded self-understanding, especially in conjunction with tools like the MBTI. However, its predictive-ness by design can create problems when the person interested in the results is an employer.
One of the reasons it’s important to work with an MBTI-certified practitioner in a team development setting is that people are understandably wary about providing information about themselves that could affect their careers. In a development setting, participating in a workshop is a tougher sell when the model used is designed to predict performance or job suitability.
MBTI practitioners explain these nuances to participants and managers — preferences are not indicative of ability or predictive of success in a role but can help teams work together better by understanding each other better.
With these differences in explanatory power in mind, it’s easy to see how tools like the MBTI have been widely adopted by organizations for team development and tools like the Big Five are used more often in research and selection.
They quite simply provide different kinds of information that are of value in different contexts.
