Learn All About Personality Types

It is interesting, fun, and sometimes necessary to consider personality types—depending upon your objective and your job or your needs and goals and intentions. Just for the hell of it, many of us readers of top-selling mags like Cosmo, for example, take the personality types quizzes that tell us who wears the pants in the relationship, or how sexy we are in bed, or how hyper, nervous, funny, fat, etc. we are…. The greatest fun of personality types tests—quizzes that don’t get graded, really—are those online that allow us to objectify, colorize, or animalize ourselves…by taking, for instance, the “what kind of car are you?” test or the “which animal do you most closely identify?” with quiz.

But more seriously, and more useful, are the more regulated personality types tests that we can take, administer, and use for job-searches, lifestyle choices, management purposes, or workplace facilitation. For example, the grand daddy of them all (actually, the great-grandma and grandma of them all) is the Myers-Briggs personality types Indicator:

Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs-Meyers, designed the test for personality types during World War II, basing it on Jungian theory regarding personality types. The Myers-Briggs, then, tests how one sees the world, how one approaches or prefers to approach the world and living. The results of the test, as it is applied in schools, in the workplace, in therapy, in skills assessment situations, etc., determine not a measurement of abilities…but a determination of personality types, or a tendency toward or combination of personality types: first, as Jung first developed the construct, the personality types fall into two ranges of attitudes— Introversion and Extroversion. Then, those personality types who fit the Introversion side have such characteristics as STJ, sensing, thinking, and judging…while those of the Extroversion side have degrees of intuiting, feeling, and perceiving.

So a manager might use these personality types to the betterment of the workplace—to the benefit of the company/organization and extending the well-being of the employees within the infrastructure. In other words, the smart facilitator would use the gifts of the feeling personality for relations, creativity, and other judging tasks, for example, or allow the thinking personality types to do group leadership/instruction or work in private with information processing tasks.

The personality types indicators are as wide-ranging and encompassing as they can be, given the comprehensive and complex nature of personality types, that is. But at the same time, such “tests” as the Myers-Briggs can do wonders for helping get jobs, get through school, or get over employee interpersonal dynamics.