MBTI® Personality Types and Your Decision Making Process

MBTI ® Personality Types influence many aspects of behavior, including leadership tendencies and communication style, as we’ve discussed in previous blogs. In this next series of blogs, we will explore how MBTI Personality Types can affect corporate team members’ decision making, including what factors they consider and what outcomes they value. Being aware of employees, managers and even CEO’s and executives MBTI Personality Types in the workplace can help you develop a deeper understanding of why certain decisions are made as well as how the decision making process can be streamlined. These newfound insights are imperative to starting critical conversations that reduce conflict and that work towards more effective, efficient, and balanced decision making in the workplace.

Read about MBTI Personality Types and Decision-Making

Hirsh and Hirsh (2007) observe that MBTI Personality Types serve as a lens that can help focus and clarify behavior patterns in much the same way that optical lenses can help focus and clarify vision. MBTI types can be broadly categorized by four different sliding scales, each of which reveals individuals’ different values and thought processes in terms of decision making. The first scale is extraverted-introverted, where extraverted individuals process information collaboratively with others and crave breadth and range over depth of understanding. Introverted individuals on the other hand, prefer to think things through on their own and prefer to understand fewer things more deeply. The second scale is sensing-intuition. Sensing individuals tend to draw information from the real world and consider that information sequentially, while those with intuitive tendencies jump from idea to idea and prefer conceptual data to concrete data. The third scale is thinking–feeling, where thinking individuals tend to think logically and linearly, with objective responses and considerations, while feeling individuals respond more personally and consider the consequences of decisions for relationships and people rather than abstract structures or ideologies. The final scale is judging-perceiving. Judging individuals tend to move quickly towards decisions and desire certainty in the success of that decision. On the other hand, perceiving individuals need more time to process and stay open to changing the solution or decision that has been agreed upon.

These four scales yield a total of 16 combinations, which are the 16 MBTI Personality Types, each of which approach decision making in different ways, depending on their own personality tendencies and preferences. People with differing personality types may understand or empathize with one another to varying degrees intuitively. However, making these insights explicit can be instrumental in every stage of decision making, from initial brainstorming, to the evaluation of various ideas, to reaching an agreement, to implementation, and finally, reflection and evaluation.

In the upcoming series of blogs, we will explore the decision making style of each Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® personality type in detail. At each stage of the decision making process, we will consider the strengths and challenges individuals may have, in addition to how they contribute uniquely to teams with diverse personality types. Last but far from least, we include steps for longer term professional growth as well as concrete strategies that each personality type can use immediately to improve their communication with others, ultimately improving their and their team’s decision making.

References

Introduction to Type and Decision Making. (Hirsh, K., & Hirsh E. CPP. 2007)

Click on a link below to read more about different MBTI Personality Types