Understanding your personality type helps you to:
- understand your own personality and behaviours:
- identify your strengths and weaknesses
- which behaviours come easily, and those which take effort
- which behaviours may hinder you from teaching effectively and demonstrating human factors principles in everyday practice.
- Understand the personality and behaviours of others
- the person you may find irritating may not be behaving a particular way purposefully, they just see the world in a different way than you do.
The MBTI is based on Carl Jung's theory of personality and is divided into 16 different types. It was first developed in the 1940s by psychologists Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter-in-law, Isabel Briggs Myers.
The theory is that seemingly random variations in behaviour are actually orderly and consistent, due to basic differences in our perception and judgement of situations.
The MBTI, purposely not called a test, helps us to understand our own personality and appreciate differences between people. When performing this test to understand our behaviour preferences it is important to think about how we would act away from the work environment, as at work we may have consciously or subconsciously adapted some of our behaviours away from our natural preference.
There is no best type, just your type.
Jung CG. Psychological types. In: Collected works of CG Jung. Vol 6, 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1971 [First appeared in German in 1921].