The MBTI tool vs. the Five Factor Model— two scientific approaches for different use cases

Dr. Rich Thompson, the Divisional Director of Research at The Myers-Briggs Company, recently spoke about a tool that the MBTI assessment is often compared to — the Five Factor model.

This model of personality assessment also goes by the names ‘NEO’, as well as ‘the Big Five’, and serves as a respected and widely used approach for clinical and academic psychologists.

While The Big Five has been positioned by some journalists and critics as a kind of foil to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment, Thompson explains that, counter to popular knowledge, these tools in fact correlate highly with each other.

Rather than being thought of as competitive instruments, it may be more accurate to say that each of these heavily researched, science-based approaches have their own place in the world of personality assessment and psychology.

Just like a hammer or a nail gun, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish as to which tool is best for the job.

Here’s what Dr. Thompson had to say (click here to view the video):

I’ve been at The Myers-Briggs Company for about eighteen years. While I do work with all of our assessments, for the last five or six years I have been working almost exclusively with the MBTI assessment. I’ve found it to be a very useful and powerful tool. It has great measurement properties and works exactly as it’s intended to work.

So for the last 30 or so years the approach to personality measurement that’s been very common in academic circles is something we call the Big Five or the Five Factor model.

This model emerged when researchers gathered several personality measures and performed factor analysis on them. They found that, of all the different ways people have thought about personality, there are generally five clumps or areas that seem to account for most of the measures of personality. These formed the ‘Five Factors’.

What’s interesting is that Isabelle Briggs-Myers and Carl Jung had identified four of those five factors or dimensions of personality long before all of the factor analysis work that formed the basis of The Big Five. So in fact they were way ahead of the game in terms of measuring important personality constructs.

If you think the MBTI is measuring nothing, then the Big Five is measuring nothing as well.

The four dimensions of the MBTI correlate fairly highly with four of the Big Five measures.”

*Note: The fifth Big Five measure, neuroticism, is not addressed by the MBTI instrument, which provides a value-neutral view of personality in line with its theoretical underpinnings.

Research has shown, for example, a high correlation for the Extraversion/Introversion and Sensing/Intuition measure in the MBTI instrument and Big Five dimensions.

So the idea that MBTI measures nothing and Big Five measures something does not hold up in light of the fact that they correlate as highly as they do. Rather, it means that they’re both measuring something that is somewhat similar, though not exactly the same.

The MBTI: a practical tool for practical problems

Dr. Thompson went on to discuss how the reliable measurements of personality provided by the MBTI instrument, along with its easily comprehensible reporting format, makes it a practical tool that can be useful in addressing many common challenges in the workplace:

With the MBTI, people learn about themselves and the people they work with, so it’s useful for things like team-building. It answers questions such as, how do you have an effective team? How do you work with people who are different from you who may be up to slightly different ways of approaching problems and situations?

It also provides insight that can form career choices. Different people have different proclivities and different ways they like to do things, which often have implications for their careers.

Another thing to remember — the MBTI instrument does not predict job performance, but it does shed light on how personality preferences may play out in certain professional settings.

Furthermore, it’s been shown that people tend to gravitate toward various careers by personality type, and in many professions, one personal type is much more common than others.

And even if, as the theory behind the MBTI assessment suggests, anybody can do any kind of a job, the instrument provides information about context. So it might be that you are a great accountant but, based on your personality type, you might learn that you may not enjoy working for a top firm, but would be more comfortable working for an NGO.

Keep in mind, there are a lot of online ‘quizzes’ that will give you a four-letter type, but they are not all the actual MBTI assessment (though many claim to be). You can only take the research-backed, scientifically valid MBTI assessment through mbtionline.com or through an MBTI Certified Practitioner who’s been trained in the psychometric theory and ethics of personality assessents.

Want to learn more from Dr. Thompson and others about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment? Check out this YouTube playlist.

You can also find answers and research links to the most commonly asked questions about the MBTI assessment here. And you can take the MBTI assessment for yourself, your career or your team.