Measures of Personality

This paper will discuss the personality tests used in business and industry to correctly place employees. The two types of tests researched are the MBTI (Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator) and the Big Five Personality Test. The stated reliability and validity of each test and the circumstances in which using one of these tests would apply will be discussed further.

The first test researched was the MBTI or the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. MBTI is the most widely used personality instrument in history. Based on 70 years of research, it is now translated into 19 languages and administered to over 2 million people each year (mbtitoday.org, 2006). Personality Type or Psychological Type are terms most commonly associated with the model of personality development created by Isabel Briggs Myers the author of the world's most widely used personality inventory, the MBTI or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. ® Myers' and her mother, Katharine Briggs, developed their model and inventory around the ideas and theories of psychologist Carl Jung, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and a leading exponent of Gestalt personality theory (mbtitoday.org,

English: Carl Gustav Jung, full-length portrait, s...

Español: Tipo Myers-Briggs INTJ

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2006).

Beginning in the early 1940's, Myers & Briggs extended Jung's model with the initial development of the MBTI. They put Jung's concepts into language that could be understood and used by the average person. Isabel Myers' book "Gifts differing", published posthumously in 1980 provided a comprehensive introduction to the Jung/Myers theory. Myers' book and her philosophy of celebrating human diversity anticipated the workplace diversity movement (mbtitoday.org, 2006).

In her studies of people and extensive reading of Jung's theories, Myers concluded there were four primary ways people differed from one another. She labeled these differences "preferences" drawing a similarity to "hand preferences" to illustrate that although we all use both of our hands, most of us have a preference for one...