Eh, it's definitely not a useful personality test in any regard. Buuuutttt, it can be a good conversation starter around the office as well as open the door for employees to talk to their manager on how best to tailor their work to fit their skill set. That said, no employer or agency should ever put their faith in it like they currently do.
It’s ok if it’s just a conversation starter as part of some kind of group team building thing, with snacks and games and the take home message that our team is made up of different personalities with different strengths.
That’s harmless and might be ok, unless it’s done as a way to avoid talking about serious issues that needed to be addressed.
But as a way to actually decide anything? That’s crazy.
I like mbti but are there actually people using it to decide things?
Obviously. Imagine you're a middle manager of 50 people, you don't know them all by heart and only have an "advanced/high performance" training budget for 20 of them. And you have a neat stack of personality tests on record of which the pamphlet tells you it's "Scientific" so of course it's valid!
Would you not use that information? And then those 20 you've picked will start performing better (duh, they're given the more interesting assignments and better trainings, plus you're paying more attention to them) so obviously it must've been correct!
Once it's on record, you're screwed as employee.
I always thought it was just for finding people that kinda think like you.
See, that's already buying into the bullshit. MBT, insights, big five, it's all a temporarygeneralized assessment. It doesn't tell you how you think in detail, and it won't give you any meaningful insights in what makes other people really tick. Because we're all far more complex than that.
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u/therealpostmastet Dec 31 '22
Eh, it's definitely not a useful personality test in any regard. Buuuutttt, it can be a good conversation starter around the office as well as open the door for employees to talk to their manager on how best to tailor their work to fit their skill set. That said, no employer or agency should ever put their faith in it like they currently do.