Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 37

As mentioned previously, leadership style is often a reflection of the personality traits of the leader. A good understanding of the varieties of personalities of the research team is crucial to developing a keen working atmosphere, but perhaps more imperatively, a thorough understanding of one's own personality can help identify strengths and weaknesses in learning, leadership, and communicative ability. Carl Jung and later, Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Briggs contributed significantly to the psychological study of personality typology, their research still applied in the workplace to study interactions among co‐workers, and even a medical student's affinity to certain subspecialties (Freeman 2004; Stilwell et al. 2000; Myers 1962; Myers and Davis 1965). Developed in the 1950s, the Myers‐Briggs Typology Indicator (MBTI), though under some criticism for its reproducibility and validity, can offer a general assessment of personality for an individual if the assessment is taken honestly, and without too much thought into any one question (Freeman 2004; Pittenger 2005). Honest answers from the unique experiences of problem solving, learning style, and communicative ability of the examinee usually result in a genuine assessment congruent to the examinee's temperament. The tool itself can serve as an introductory method to introduce individual differences between group members, which may be beneficial in the beginnings of a group research project, but not meant to be taken too seriously into account (Freeman 2004; Pittenger 2005). There are a variety of exams available online at no charge, yet official ones may be purchased online as well.

The MBTI is a personality assessment tool that, through a series of simple questions, creates a four‐letter personality type for the examinee based on four different personality attributes, originally described by Carl Jung (Freeman 2004). Each personality attribute contains two contrasting subtypes, each represented by a letter. With this breakdown, Myers and Briggs hypothesized that everyone could fall into 1 of 16 different personality types (critics often dismissing the MBTI as too narrowly grouping the personalities of the population) (Pittenger 2005). The four major personality attributes measured by the MTBI are described as follows.