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So I’ve been asked to take an MBTI for a work activity and was told that we would be assigned to teams based on our results. Mildly surprised to see it used this way since I’m in a STEM field, but whatever. It’s not a significant project by any means (a few hours per week at most) and I self-reported my results honestly (INTJ).
They likely want to mix personality types. I don’t buy into MBTI, but I think the I-E and T-F axes are at least somewhat consistent. Based on the quiz they sent us, EXFX types appear to be people uninterested in logical thinking, impenetrable to reasoned argument, and less organized (literally had questions like "I tend to miss deadlines" and "I go with my emotions over logical thinking").
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
ENTJ because i'm a team player and a people person that just loves to work!!!
Psychometrics in the workplace is oppressive and can do nothing but harm you professionally. Never cooperate honestly with these.
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I used to be very into MBTI types, because as an ITP woman, I often felt like I needed an explanation for my personality.
I would probably be honest. MBTI is fairly values balanced, such that there aren't universally better or worse answers. That's its main value proposition, in addition to having a more constrained number of possible results.
The problem with OCEAN, from an employee's perspective, is that it's more threatening. Employers always want their workers to be conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable. Especially conscientious. So if it were an OCEAN test, I might try to look more conscientious than I actually am.
Adding: you'd want an extroverted feeling teammate if you're planning a social event.
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Depends on the job, I guess, and I haven't taken the test in awhile. I usually get ISTP, but if I'm emotionally dysregulated (therapy-speak for "excessively stuck in my feelings, usually with a connotation of despair and self-pity but on rare occasions excitement?!) I'll score ISFP, and while I haven't taken those tests in 5-10 years I would consider myself a lot more extroverted than I did then (but probably not enough to earn an E over I).
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MBTI has a bunch of different uses, one example is managers using it as a shortcut to determine what feedback style is most likely to work (at least initially) for the employee. Try and figure out what exactly they are doing with the data beyond sending people to various teams.
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The problem with MBTI isn't that the axes aren't consistent. They're obsoleted by OCEAN, because "factor analysis" performs better than "Jung plus guessin'", but they're reasonably consistent and informative.
The trouble is that half the time (or 90% of the time?) you see MBTI used, the axes aren't treated as axes, they're treated as binary categories. If your MBTI test doesn't rank you from "100T, 0F" to "0T, 100F", it just calls you "T" or "F", then it's approximately as useful as a nearly-blank tape measure with a single mark to delineate the boundary between "Tall" and "Short". Yes, those are real concepts, not imaginary ones, but they're not describing bimodal distributions, so at least there should be a third category that the modal person can fit into, stably and without having to flip a coin.
It actually goes beyond that. In MTBI a T isn't just a T, but a cognitive function at a particular placement. You have 4 placements: Dominant, Aux, Tertiary, and Inferior and together they make your categorization. Cognitive functions can be extroverted or introverted, the E/I on MTBI marks which starts first then they alternate. So not only are they an axis but a T in two different types means two different things.
For example, a T in an INTJ is their Aux function: Extroverted Thinking, a T in an INTP is their Dominant function: Introverted Thinking. There're all sorts of analyses on what that actually means but it definitely doesn't mean that all Ts, Es, Is, Fs etc. are alike, will get along together, or will connect.
The hardcore real MTBI tests require an in-person psychologist visit that takes hours. the hokie test that corpo's give you or that you can find online generally aren't very "accurate" and thus really lend to the stereotype of sciency-astrology.
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It's a long time since I took a MBTI test, but I'm pretty sure I got percentage results that I could evaluate myself, which is why I always said I'm XNTP despite consistently scoring higher on I than on E (but always only ca 60%). It's not really a fault of the system that many people are lazy that they boil everything down to two categories.
INTX here. I like that coding.
It's been a good 20 years for me, but back then I encountered both types of tests, and the catch was that while the one administered in an educational system was a proper continuum-results test, the ones that were rapidly spreading around the internet like astrology-for-nerds were all binary-result versions. People debating MBTI validity often seemed to be talking past each other as a result, arguing about two significantly different categories of test as if they were the same because they were named the same.
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