How Personality Tests Can Help Build Productive Teams

Personality tests are used by most large businesses. This can be to help decide who the best candidates are or to improve individual and group performance. These include the Myers-Briggs personality test and the Five Factor Model. Are these evaluations really helpful?

For a long time, personality tests have outperformed job-related ability tests in terms of their ability to predict employment success. In this essay, we shall discuss some of these popular tests and examine how reliable they are.

Reliability of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Due to its intuitive way of clustering behavior categories, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) remains one of the most frequently applied personality inventories in business settings. Researchers have identified five types which tend to get high salaries, reach positions of responsibility or run their own business. Sage does an excellent summary in this infographic.

According to MBTI, each person’s unique combination is composed of four dichotomous categories. By merging these categories together it becomes possible for revealing a person’s preferred ways of thinking and working.

The assessment is easy to understand. It takes little time and effort as well as self-administered.

Unfortunately, the MBTI continues to be widely used despite not enough evidence that it is valid. It has low test-retest scores (this means that taking the same test after five weeks will give you different results), ranging from 0.42 through 0.78 with a minimum allowable value being 0.8 . Psychologists have argued against any idea that personality traits are continuous rather than binary since its inception.

Other models

Fortunately there exist other options for MBTI such as alternatives The Predictive Index (PI) quantifies a person's percentage of extraversion rather than placing them into one category such as extravert or introvert only.

The PI was specifically designed for "occupational and organisational populations" and has been widely used for over 50 years. It primarily assesses the degree of dominance, patience, and formality which are beneficial qualities in the corporate world.

A team with these two properties will make quick judgements up till such a time when they differ, that is when there will be heated arguments leading to no activity thereafter. Nevertheless, it may become detrimental to have too many members from one type of personality.

Even though it is more common, the Adaptiv Resilience Factor Inventory could also be included as it focuses more on identifying empathy and resilience levels in individuals. This exam might help keep teams balanced by testing how well an individual can get along with different types of people. Regrettably, there is no independent research evidence to back this test’s reliability.

The Big Five

Amongst business people, The Five Factor Model (FFM), sometimes referred to as the “Big Five personality traits”, currently has the greatest empirical support and can therefore be employed for forecasting employee success.

At inception FFM had nothing to do with assessing personalities; instead it was developed over several decades as numerous psychologists identified common personality characteristics among individuals from different cultures and backgrounds. These stable (and partly hereditary) features are classified according to the following categories:

• Originality
• Consolidation
• Extraversion
• Accommodation
• Need for Stability

For example, originality measures a person’s readiness for unknown; high scores on this scale are often associated with creativity and curiosity while low scores frequently indicate lack of inventiveness or being conventional.

Significantly, ratings are on a scale rather than giving someone a label. Furthermore, it doesn’t combine the results of the five dimensions in any predetermined way unlike MBTI. However, FFM provides only a very general picture of someone’s usual tendencies because it recognises that personalities can change over time as well as in different situations.

However, some critics view FFM categories as too broad or claim they do not accurately measure certain attributes like realism.

Should we disregard personality tests once ambiguity sets in?

A business needs different kinds of individuals to be successful. They need extroverted workers who are good at boosting moral and generating fresh company ideas but these ideas would go nowhere without other people to help them materialise.

It is very crucial therefore even though assessment development still lags behind this fact the understanding of prospective employees and their possible interactions with others is essential. Of course there are other ways apart from conventional exams that gauge aptitude for hiring, including interviews, problem-solving sessions and teamwork exercises which have increasingly been used together with personality inventories to gain more insight into candidates.

To assess how employees react to varied workplace situations via alternative methods which eliminate self-reporting biases modern personality assessment appears to be gradually changing towards more fun ways of measurement like games or simulated scenarios. While these assessments may be useful; recent studies indicate that “play style” corresponds to personality as a type of behavioral appraisal scale. The best way is on an individual basis. One piece of advise: don’t just rely on everything they tell you!

Although new theories and testing protocols continue to emerge, FFM remains the most reliable and extensively proven tool for organisations that desire to predict employee behavior in future years.