"Personality assessments have become woven into the fabric of modern organizational life to the point that there's no avoiding them. DiSC, Belbin, Myers-Briggs, and their cousins are often among the first tools we encounter as we enter the corporate world. They show up in onboarding sessions, leadership programs, recruitment processes, and executive classrooms, and that familiarity breeds acceptance just like their repeated use breeds expectation, to the point where not administering an assessment can feel like a missing ingredient."
"Many of the most widely used personality frameworks were never built through decades of cumulative, hypothesis-driven scientific research. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, for example, was developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers in the mid-twentieth century, drawing heavily on Carl Jung's theory of psychological types. Neither had formal training in psychometrics, and the instrument was designed primarily for practical use in wartime United States rather than empirical rigor."
Personality assessments such as DiSC, Belbin, and Myers-Briggs are deeply integrated into organizational processes like onboarding, leadership development, recruitment, and executive training. Repeated use and familiarity create expectations and normalize assessment-driven interventions. Many popular instruments were developed for practicality and intuitive appeal rather than through rigorous psychometric research and validation. Individuals frequently interpret assessment outcomes as fixed descriptions of identity rather than as context-sensitive indicators. Personality expression shifts across social contexts, so assessments function best as comparative tools for discussion and development rather than as precise, immutable measures of who a person is.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]