KEY POINTS:
When people clash at work many find it helps to understand their personality type.
Psychologists Jean de Bruyne, Auckland, and Colin Hopkirk, Napier, use a range of psychometric tools in their work with organisations.
One of these is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which has been translated into more than 30 languages and taken by millions of individuals throughout the world.
"Typically when two people are in conflict, they both claim to love their job and the organisation and want the other person to leave," says De Bruyne. "If leaving is the only option, understanding their Myers Briggs type can allow employees to see why a position wasn't a good match. That way, they make the decision to leave themselves. They become more aware of their communication style and what sort of work and culture suit them so when they go job hunting they can disregard all the things that don't suit."
Colin Hopkirk is the accredited trainer for MBTI and the New Zealand Association of Psychological Type. Where there is room in organisations to work with teams, he finds knowledge of the Myers Briggs type provides a language for talking about what suits people's strengths and enables teams to reorganise the work.
"I prefer to use the MBTI as a tool because it's positive and constructive for people and emphasises healthy functioning," says Hopkirk. "It's quite gutsy and able to address things that can be problems in a range of areas such as relationships, career planning, team building, educational settings as well as work places. Type is certainly not everything, but it's interesting how often some aspect of type difference between oneself and somebody else - boss, partner, staff member - is the [problematic] thing."
The MBTI is a psychologically validated tool devised more than 50 years ago by two American women, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, who based their work on Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's "Psychological Types".
The MBTI identifies four key dichotomies that direct people's behaviour in particular ways. These are ways people prefer to: get and use their energy, either through interaction with the world (extraversion - E) or inner reflection (introversion - I); gather and take in information, by either focusing on data available to the five senses (sensing - S) or on concepts and ideas (intuition - N); make decisions, either through a logical "head" process (thinking - T) or a personalised "heart" approach (feeling - F); conduct their lives, either in a planned, scheduled way (judging - J) or an open, spontaneous fashion (perceiving - P). Extraversion and introversion, judging and perceiving are called mental attitudes - where the energy goes and what the lifestyle is like. Sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling are called mental functions.
The theory is that people use all of these mental functions and attitudes in different combinations. They can be skilled at all of them but retain a preference for one particular function; the dominant function that they either extravert through interaction with the outer world or introvert through a reflective process.
People tend not to have equally strong preferences and prefer one of each pair over the other, similar to favouring using the right or left hand.
The different combinations of 16 personality types formed from E or I; S or N; T or F; J or P have their own flavour, which people of the same type recognise and relate to.
De Bruyne self-reports as ESTJ (extraversion; sensing; thinking; judging) - a practical, logical, decisive type. "I practice in a commercial [realm]. A lot of the work involves testing and measuring, helping firms and people to solve problems. The focus on outcomes suits my personality."
She warns against the unethical uses of the MBTI.
"It's not a reliable recruitment tool and to use it that way is not permitted. It can be seductive to try and find the right person that way but people often like to [be] a certain type and it is easily faked. If people are smart they'll give the employers the answers they are looking for. It also doesn't measure how well someone can perform."
Once a new recruit is on board, the MBTI is valuable if it is used well, says Hopkirk, INFJ (introversion; intuition; feeling; judging) - an insightful type that values harmony.
"Knowing type can help to bring a new employee into a job so they quickly and efficiently come up to speed, make professional connections with colleagues and reports, and fit into the team," says Hopkirk.
Even when people don't like the idea of being "boxed in" to a type, De Bruyne says the exercise in self-awareness is valuable.
"One member of a team I worked with recently hated the idea of being boxed in by anything. Doing the MBTI prompted her to ask questions about who she is and what she was doing in that organisation. In my view that process is more important than a person knowing their type."
* For more information or to find a registered MBTI practitioner: www.nzapt.org.nz
