For decades, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been the most-popular personality test on the market.
However, with the passage of time and the development of a number of theoretically richer and empirically better-founded approaches to personality theory and testing, the market dominance of MBTI is now waning.
The MBTI was developed slowly over a period of many years. Its creators, Katharine Cook Briggs (1875–1968) and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers (1897–1980), began constructing their own personality theory in the wake of the English translation of Personality Types by Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) in 1923, They moved on to develop materials for mass testing purposes during World War II.
The first institution to officially adopt the MBTI was the newly founded private assessment company, Educational Testing Service (ETS), in 1962.
Over the subsequent decades, more than 10,000 private-sector firms, colleges and universities, and US government agencies have adopted the MBTI.
The MBTI is basically a four-factor theory, with each factor (in parentheses) also liable to further interpretation as a dichotomous pair of traits (in italics):
- Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I) (manner of obtaining energy)
- Sensing (S) – Intuition (N) (mode of perceiving)
- Thinking (T) – Feeling (F) (mode of judging)
- Judging (J) – Perceiving (P) (orientation toward others)
While the MBTI provides convincing analyses of many people’s personalities—as evaluated by providing a framework for understanding their behavior—it has become clear that there is much room for improvement.
That’s because four factors are simply too few to provide a well-rounded analysis of the different aspects of human personality that play a causal role in our behavior and cognition.
A profusion of more-recent tests has extended the MBTI’s techniques in a variety of different directions.
The Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) is one such test.
Developed by Clemson University psychology professors Fred S. Switzer III (b. 1953) and Jo Jorgensen(b. 1957), the SPPT goes beyond the MBTI in two important respects.
First, it offers a multidimensional approach comprising 19 fundamental personality traits. The following numbered list sets out these traits (in italics), along with explanatory glosses for each one (in parentheses):
- Achievement Striving (highly motivated, desiring to excel at tasks and to outperform others)
- Agreeableness (wanting to be liked, being warm, compassionate, and empathetic)
- Assertiveness (desiring to present and defend one’s ideas to others)
- Business Acumen (knowing one’s organization and industry)
- Cautiousness (taking thought and care in confronting problems)
- Cooperation (ability to work better by working with others)
- Core Self-evaluation (having self-confidence, feeling capable of succeeding)
- Creativity (being skillful in innovative thinking and problem-solving)
- Dutifulness (being dependable and reliable)
- Meta-leadership (understanding how one’s own leadership role fits into higher-level organizational structures)
- Need for Autonomy (desiring to be able to act independently and take the initiative)
- Need for Cognition (desiring information, being thoughtful)
- Perseverance (desiring to do “whatever it takes” to succeed)
- Self-regulation (self-restraint, having the tendency to apportion one’s actions to one’s goals)
- Social Intelligence (being able to “read” other people’s emotions)
- Team Orientation (being aware of the advantages of, and having a preference for, working in teams)
- Tolerance for Ambiguity (being able to function with decisiveness even in the presence of uncertainty)
- Trust (having the tendency to believe that others act largely in good faith and for the good of their organizations)
- Vision (having the tendency to consider and work toward long-term goals)
This much fuller representation of the various aspects of human personality makes possible a more accurate and profound portrayal of a given individual’s true strengths and weaknesses.
To be sure, there are other recent personality tests on the market which postulate more than four traits à la MBTI. However, the second respect in which the SSPT goes beyond the MBTI is particularly impressive for being unique.
Namely, unlike any other personality test on the market today, the SPPT is squarely focused on how the individual’s various traits interact with four work-roles that individuals commonly occupy during their professional lives.
These work-roles are as follows:
- Working on one’s own
- Working on a team
- Leading a team
- Interacting with one’s manager
In other words, the SPPT emphasizes the importance of taking a situational, or contextual, approach to understanding the various ways the human personality may adapt to a work environment.
As a measure of the greater richness of the SPPT, it should be noted that it provides a numerical measurement, or percentage, for each of the 19 basic traits it posits, in conjunction with each of the four work-roles.
This means the test output materials provide analyses of 19 x 4 = 76 distinct combinations of traits-cum-work-role (minus a few trait-situation combinations where the trait doesn’t arise in the situation; for example, the trait team orientation is absent when working alone).
In short, the personality testing industry, in general, and the SPPT, in particular, have come a long way since the MBTI.