Help uncover the unique talents of the MBTI personalities at work!

Following Duval’s research in 2013 and 2018 asking the question, ‘Can entrepreneurial success be predicted?’, Fingerprint for Success (F4S) has been committed to researching performance, well-being, and human development in the future of work.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a well-known personality test that assigns a personality type based on four traits dichotomies. For many years, people have used MBTI as an instrument to develop self-awareness and to guide their personal decisions (MBTI, 2020).

• By 2015, an estimated 55 million people had taken the MBTI, making it the most highly used personality inventory available. The test was first introduced in 1942, and was the work of mother and daughter, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. There are now several different versions of the test available. Form M, which contains 93 items, is the most commonly used (Ford-Martin, & Frey, R. 2020), followed by 16 Personalities, the highly popular online personality profiling tool.
• The Myers-Briggs inventory is based on Carl Jung's theory of types, outlined in his 1921 work Psychological Types. Jung's theory holds that human beings are either introverts or extroverts, and their behavior follows from these inherent psychological types. He also believed that people take in and process information in different ways, based on their personality traits (Ford-Martin, & Frey, R. 2020).
• Fingerprint for Success is expanding on the current understanding of MBTI personality types in the context of work by asking, “What are the motivational and cognitive biases of each of the MBTI 16 personality types at work?”.
• At present, as many as 80 percent of managerial recruitments across the Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies depend on psychometric tools, while 68 percent of all employers in Western Europe and the USA now use some form of psychometric assessment as part of their recruitment and development process.
• Given increasingly esoteric job roles, the need to uncover the latent human (soft skill) talents will call for even greater forensic examination of characteristics, preferences, and the ability to develop the talent of the future (Cook & Cripps, 2005). Fueled with this same vision, F4S’s research (Duval, 2013) explored the human (soft) skills attributed to the success of a particular group, initially founders, in a specific context, such as startups and high-growth ventures. Yet there are many more roles that need exploration.

By building upon the MBTI with an evidence-based approach, it is possible to uncover the correlations between personality type and work-style preference, uncovering new data that may add further applications for the use of MBTI in conjunction with motivational traits at work in specific roles.

It is our belief this world-first research will provide a comprehensive insight into how personality, attitudes, and cognitive styles can become the catalyst for transformative change in the future of work.