Miracle weapon personality test?

Many companies use personality tests with different objectives:

• Personality tests in employee and management development to provide employees with an easy-to-understand, simple model to help them reflect on themselves and understand where and how they can develop.
• Personality test in recruiting and promotion processes to check whether the candidate/employee “fits” the respective role.
• Personality test in teams to see whether the “mix of personalities” is sufficiently diverse or whether “monocultures” of personalities are forming

Typical personality tests that are often used are, for example

• The DISG model sorts people into four colors: red (Dominant), yellow (Proactive), green (Steady) and blue (Conscientious). Several colors can be dominant. In my experience, however, coachees come to us with one opinion: “I’m yellow, therefore …” or “I’m just red, that’s just the way it is …”
• A little more differentiated, also popular: The Myers-Briggs type indicator, which combines 4 dimensions (introverted/extroverted, intuitive/sensory, thinking/feeling and perceiving/judging) into a total of 16 personality types. These are then given quite catchy names (e.g. “consul”, “adventurer”, etc.).

Interestingly, these models were of interest to scientists and psychologists 20 or 30 years ago. Until they realized that these tests were not reliable and meaningful from a scientific perspective.

Why? And why do we also view these models critically from the coach’s perspective?

1. The models mentioned simplify people into too few dimensions (4 in each case). This simplification can be nicely explained in the context of personnel development measures. However, it does not correspond in any way to the complexity of human beings. The alternative models we use utilize considerably more dimensions (e.g. the Big Five test).
2. Employees and managers often see themselves as dominant in one dimension, for example in the red “alpha” dimension. In reality, however, we humans have different “I’s” within us, which are sometimes – but not always – in inner dialog and which become active at different times and in different situations. Sometimes relevant ‘ego parts’ are repressed from early experiences. We find that richness in personal development, self-understanding and mindfulness only arises when we see and allow these different ‘I’s and engage in an inner dialog.
3. The models suggest that people are “like this and like that”. Instead, we believe that people behave in a situation-specific way. Often the behavior is unconscious, sometimes unwanted. And we know that pigeonholing the “I” makes it difficult to change behavior. In fact, the pigeonhole is often unconsciously used as a justification for why a change in behavior is not possible.
   
   

A nice summary by psychologist and science journalist Corinna Hartmann can be found in Spektrum Psychologie 01.25: https://www.spektrum.de/news/persoenlichkeit-was-misst-der-myers-briggs-typenindikator/2229304. She writes: