About the Instrument

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire and is the world’s leading personality assessment instrument.  The authors of the MBTI, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, were astute observers of human personality differences.  They studied and elaborated on the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung and applied these theories to acquiring a better understanding of people and their preferences for communicating with others.  The waste of human potential in World War II sparked the development of the MBTI by Myers, and gave rise to her desire to give a wide range of individuals access to the benefits found in understanding human differences as they relate to various psychological types.

The MBTI provides information about people’s preferences for communicating and dealing with information.  These individual preferences deal with:

• where people focus their attention – outer world or inner world (Extroversion vs. Introversion scale)
• how people prefer to take in information or find out about things (Sensing vs. Intuition scale)
• how people prefer to make decisions (Thinking vs. Feeling scale)
• how people are oriented toward the outer world (Judging vs. Perceiving scale)

Benefits of the MBTI

The MBTI is a highly valid and reliable instrument that is used extensively in industry as a tool to:

• help people better understand themselves, their strengths, and their own  personal preferences
• help people better understand and appreciate individual differences in others – and their preferences
• help people learn to use their particular TYPE to their own best advantage in dealing with others
• help people become more effective communicators by understanding personality TYPES better
• help people improve their interpersonal communication
• facilitate work group functioning
• enhance individual performance in the workplace