Leadership Research Summary:
- The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a popular tool used by psychologists working as managers’ coaches in organizational contexts. Despite its popularity, few studies provide empirical evidence on the role of the MBTI as a predictor of managers’ leadership-related behaviors. This study is written based on research that answers the question of how good the MBTI is to prove leadership behavior. It does so by comparing goodness-of-fit indexes of two confirmatory factor analysis models and two structural models on the personality-leadership relationship, following standards of reproducible research principles.
- Researchers sampled 529 participants who were graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in business administration programs from Colombian universities. Results show conclusive evidence of the psychometric measurement of both MBTI and leadership practices, even though the relationship between MBTI and the leadership practices inventory proved to be weak.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- The findings of the present study confirm what other authors have said, that there is a relationship between the different personality traits displayed by individuals and their propensity to manifest or develop leadership related behaviors (Bono and Judge, 2004; D’Alessio, 2008). By combining the four personality dichotomies from the perspective of the psychological types that inspired the MBTI (Gardner and Martinko, 1996) with the five leadership practices from the transformational leadership theory (Posner and Kouzes, 1988), we mapped and evaluated 20 possible theoretical relationships between these two constructs. Only seven out of these 20 potential theoretical relationships proved to be statistically significant, and based on these pairwise relationships, we paved the way to unveil unexplored insights for theory-building purposes.
- Researchers noticed that the first personality dichotomy (P1: Extraversion-Introversion) only revealed a relevant connection with the second (L2: inspiring a shared vision) and fifth leadership practice (L5: encouraging the heart). This first relationship means extroverts inspire a shared vision more than introverts do. For the practice of encouraging the heart, extravert types are the ones that tend to motivate their followers more compared to introverts. These findings prove what Colbert et al. (2012) mentioned, that extravert types are more likely than introverts to emerge as leaders. In practical terms, this means that introverts face more difficulties in growing professionally and reaching leadership roles as they need help understanding and dealing whit this issue. A practical implication in this regard might be evident for introverts. They should learn how to express themselves without fearing vulnerable in front of others.
- Likewise, the second dichotomy (P2: Intuition-Sensing) revealed a relevant connection with the first (L1: challenge the process) and second (L2: inspiring a shared vision) leadership practices, which means that Intuitives tend to challenge the processes more than sensitives do. For the second practice, intuitive types are the ones that inspire a shared vision more than sensitives. These findings are aligned with the study of Garland and Village (2021), who used the MBTI to classify people in leadership positions and found that intuitive leaders are more visionaries than sensitive type leaders, which relates with Myers and Mccaulley (1985) that mentioned that sensitives have clear guidelines on expected roles and responsibilities. In contrast, intuitive types find opportunities to participate in designing the future; that is, accepting the uncertainty in changing times.
- Finally, the fourth personality dichotomy (P4: Judgment-Perceiving) proved to be the most relevant personality type as it associates with encouraging the heart, inspiring a shared vision, and challenging the process. This final relationship means that perceivers are more likely to motivate their followers, describe a possible path for the future, and question the status quo than judgment types do. For example, when facing transitions, perceivers tend to facilitate required changes while judgers might avoid them as they opt for maintaining traditions.
- These relevant and significant connections might be the psychological mechanisms psychologists, and other management practitioners use to promote self-awareness of their behaviors and boost team learning and development in organizational settings (Costello, 1993; Penzias, 2020). In other words, these findings have a relevant significance to organizations. Theoretically and practically, any person can be a leader, but they must be aware of their personality to identify their strengths and weaknesses and strategically work on them to improve their leadership practices.
- It is also interesting to note those connections that were not relevant, as they have to do with the third personality type (P3: Thinking-Feeling) with the third (L3: enabling others to act) and fourth leadership dimension (L4: modeling the way). The lack of relevant relationships between these conceptual nodes might be fruitful in advancing our knowledge of the different mechanisms by which personality types affect leadership practices, which is promising for teaching leadership skills (Shope et al., 2000). Suppose the way we make decisions (i.e., Thinking vs. Feeling) is an essential element that drives the willingness to become a transformational leader.
- In that case, this should facilitate leaders to interact with followers as a model that shows commitment to ideals and long-term goals, though this might not necessarily be an instantaneous process. In any case, the set of relationships that we examined in this article deserves other comments. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, previous works have focused on literature reviews (Gardner and Martinko, 1996; Brown and Reilly, 2009) and the study of Bess and Harvey (2002) is an exception in terms of describing the statistical behavior of the bimodal empirical distributions that result from using this tool as a data collection technique. In this study, researchers resumed the conceptual ideas that pinpoint the link between leadership-related behaviors and the MBTI scores that describe personality dichotomies (Waite and McKinney, 2015).