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The question came from a guest lecture my colleagues and I gave last week to an undergrad Organizational Behavior class at Wharton. While I was there a fun debate erupted about why the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still so widely used despite its extremely suspect validity statistics.

The argument against the Myers-Briggs is that it’s based on a Jungian theory that has never been supported by statistics or other empirical research. In contrast, the Big Five has loads of empirical support, so why wouldn’t we always use the Big Five instead of Myers-Briggs?

The argument in favor of Myers-Briggs is that lots of people already know how to use it (i.e. have paid to be certified in it).  So switching to a new test would require a company to pay more people to get certified, and would ultimately cost the company more money and man hours. Besides, since its rarely used for hiring/firing or other “big” decisions, the MBTI works well enough.  Right?

Of course, that begs the question: Are we really using an inferior product just because it would be too big of a hassle to switch? Or is the MBTI not inferior for other reasons?

I posted the above statement on a few Management and Leadership discussion groups on LinkedIn yesterday, and it caused quite a stir (over 30 responses within the first day).  While we didn’t fully resolve whether the MBTI was good or bad, I think we at least succeeded in giving everyone a little fresher perspective on why they’re doing what they’re doing.  If nothing else, it proved to me the power of social media for exchanging ideas like no other platform can.

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