The Myers-Briggs type indicator and transformational leadership

The Myers-Briggs type indicator
and transformational leadership
F. William Brown and Michael D. Reilly
College of Business, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, USA
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to study the possible relationship between elements of personality as
measured by the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) and transformational leadership (TL) as
measured by the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ).
Design/methodology/approach – The study was done at the North American manufacturing
facility of an international technology company. Utilizing the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire to
measure transformational leadership, over 2,000 followers provided assessments of transformational
leadership for 148 managers who had done self-assessments and had completed Form K of the MBTI.
Findings – No relationship was found between follower assessments of transformational leadership
and leader personality as measured by the MBTI. Leaders did, however, perceive themselves to be
significantly more transformational than did those who reported to them. Leader preference for
extraversion over introversion and intuition over perception were both significantly associated with
self-reports of transformational leadership.
Research limitations/implications – Studies utilizing large samples across a variety of
organizational settings are needed to confirm the results of this study.
Practical implications – This study calls into question the existence of a relationship between the
MBTI and transformational leadership. The study does not provide any support for the possible utility
of the MBTI for the prediction or explanation of transformational leadership behaviors. Assuming that
followers’ perceptions of TL are the more valid, the findings suggest that previous results linking
MBTI and TL may be measurement artifacts.
Originality/value – Utilizing a large sample, the MLQ and continuous measures of MBTI
preferences the results of this study contradict previous reports of a relationship between personality
as measured by the MBTI and transformational leadership.
Keywords Transformational leadership, Personality measurement, Self assessment
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Interest in leadership and social influence can be traced to earliest recorded history
(Bass, 1990; Bryman, 1996). However, the process of trying to understand this critical
but complex element of human enterprise has been marked by discontinuity with
periods of great excitement interspersed with protracted periods of despair and
discouragement (Hunt, 1999). Great advancements in social and organizational
psychology in the post-Second World War period were accompanied by the emergence
of schools of management and an academic-oriented study of management with roots
in the scientific method and a rigorous approach to social science (Drucker, 1988).
Numerous theories and approaches grew out of this period of productivity only to lose
headway during the second half of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s the lack of
a model of leadership that could fully describe the dynamics of the leadership process
and the inadequacy of current explanations had significantly discouraged both
practitioners and academics (Koontz, 1961). Hunt (1999) points to the emergence of
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0262-1711.htm
JMD
28,10
916
Received 27 January 2008
Revised 10 August 2008
Accepted 02 December 2008
Journal of Management Development
Vol. 28 No. 10, 2009
pp. 916-932
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0262-1711
DOI 10.1108/02621710911000677

transformational leadership theory as the force that reenergized the field and
stimulated a great leap forward in the understanding of the leadership process.
Traditionally, most studies of leadership concentrate on the behavior of the leader
and the impact of that behavior on organizational and individual outcomes. As the
study of transformational leadership developed and matured, the end of the century
marked a general agreement on both the nature and the efficacy of transformational
leadership behaviors (Lowe et al., 1996; Bass and Avolio, 1990; Bass, 1999). Invigorated
by the availability of a comprehensive theory and enjoying unusual unanimity in
regard to the behavioral dynamics of transformational leadership (Table I), researchers
have sought a more complete understanding of the leadership process by directing
their attention beyond the observable behaviors of leaders to leader’s dispositional
qualities and characteristics in an effort to expand and enlarge their understanding of
the social influence process.
Generally following an established line of research regarding the impact of
personality on transformational leadership (e.g. Schyns and Sanders, 2007; Felfe and
Schyns, 2006; Judge and Bono, 2000) and specifically informed by Hautala (2006), the
essential question in all of these studies is: to what extent are differences in personality
(in this case as measured by the MBTI) associated with perceived differences in
leadership behaviors characteristic of transformational leadership? In a study of 439
Finnish leaders and their 380 subordinates, Hautala (2006) concluded that there was a
relationship between personality, as measured by the MBTI, and transformational
leadership, as measured by Kouzes and Posner’s (1998) Leadership Personality
Inventory (LPI). Specifically, the results of the cited study indicated that personality
Psychological types Focus and preference
Extraversion-introversion: where you focus your attention
Extraversion People who prefer extraversion tend to focus their attention on the outer world of
people and things
Introversion People who prefer introversion tend to focus their attention on the inner world of
ideas and impressions
Sensing-intuition: the way you take in information
Sensing People who prefer sensing tend to take in information through the five senses
and focus on the here and now
Intuition People who prefer intuition tend to take in information from patterns and the big
picture and focus on future possibilities
Thinking-feeling: the way you make decisions
Thinking People who prefer thinking tend to make decisions based primarily on logic and
on objective analysis of cause and effect
Feeling People who prefer feeling tend to make decisions based primarily on values and
on subjective evaluation of person-centered concerns
Judging-perceiving: how you deal with the outer world
Judging People who prefer judging tend to like a planned and organized approach to life
and prefer to have things settled
Perceiving People who prefer perceiving tend to like a flexible and spontaneous approach to
life and prefer to keep their options open
Source: Adapted from MBTI Report Profile, available at: www.cpp.com/products/mbti/index.asp
Table I.
Elements of the
Myers-Briggs type
indicator
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preferences for extroversion, intuition, and perceiving were positively associated with
self-reports of transformational leadership and that a perception by subordinates of a
sensing preference among leaders was associated with transformational leadership
behaviors by their manager.
Our study examines the same conceptual relationships, using a considerably larger
sample, continuous measures of MBTI preferences, and a different and much more
widely accepted measure of transformational leadership, in the North American
manufacturing facility of an international technology company. Following a review of
the literature and a description of hypotheses, theoretical framework, and the method
for testing, an extensive examination of similarities and differences between the two
studies is provided along with potential explanations and conclusions about the
relationship between these personality measures and transformational leadership
behaviors.
The theoretical framework for this study begins with recognition of
transformational leadership’s well established positive relationship to desired
organizational outcomes. To the extent that transformational leadership is based on
and delivered through inborn enduring personal differences, it seems logical that
personality preferences measured by the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
have the potential to illuminate important dispositional factors which are associated
with transformational leadership behaviors. An improved understanding of this
heretofore largely unexamined relationship will contribute to an increased
understanding of the social influence process and offer pathways for professional
and personal development.
Myers-Briggs type indicator
Described by its authors as one of the world’s most widely used tools to describe
personality, (Myers and McCaulley, 1985; Myers et al., 1998) the MBTI has its roots in
Jungian psychology. Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, active in the early to
mid-twentieth century, who developed a theory of psychological archetypes which
asserts that individuals have distinctive, unlearned tendencies to experience the world
in particular ways (Jung, 1971). Jung’s occasionally dense and impenetrable theories
attracted the attention of a mother and daughter team, Katharine Cook Briggs and
Isabel Briggs Myers, who believed that a knowledge of personality preferences would
help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time during the
Second World War to identify the sort of wartime jobs where they would be most
comfortable and effective (Myers and Myers, 1995). Extending Jung’s concept of
psychological archetypes and Katherine Briggs’s long-time interest in psychological
type, Myers and Briggs developed a personality typology which became known as the
Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). In its current form, as utilized in this study,
individuals complete 93 forced-choice questions which when scored produces a
measurement of three personality dimensions suggested by Jung – i.e.
extraversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling – as well as a fourth –
i.e. judgment-perception – added by Briggs and Myers to identify the dominant
function (Myers and Myers, 1995). Respondents are provided with a report indicating a
preference for behaviors typified by one of the letters in each of the four letter pairs.
Each of the dimensions is briefly described in Table I. Each combination of four letters
creates one of 16 different psychological types.
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As previously noted, the MBTI has been extensively used for over 50 years in an
extraordinarily wide variety of management and interpersonal development
applications (Gardner and Martinko, 1996). Along with this commercial success has
come considerable criticism, primarily from academic psychologists. Not surprisingly
much of the controversy centers on validity issues. Among the concerns raised has
been the use of a typology to describe personality (Mendelsohn et al., 1982), the use of
dichotomous scores (Cohen, 1983), the fact that the data are self-reported (Podsakoff
and Organ, 1986), and more general construct validity issues (McCrae and Costa, 1989;
Sipps and Alexander, 1987; Sipps and DiCaudo, 1988). These concerns must be
weighed against generally supportive validity studies (e.g. Carlyn, 1977; Carlson,
1989). Perhaps most persuasive in terms of this study is the extensive review of the use
of the MBTI to study managers by Gardner and Martinko (1996) in which they
concluded that there is sufficient validity to warrant additional research into the
relationship between the MBTI and management.
Transformational leadership
In 1978 a book on political leadership was published which would have a profound
effect on the study of leadership and management in contemporary society. James
MacGregor Burns’s book Leadership (Burns, 1978) is a study of effective leaders of
large political systems. Having studied leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nikolai
Lenin, Louis XVI, and John F. Kennedy, Burns developed a taxonomy of leadership
which characterized leaders as either “transactional” or “transformational”. Burns
(1978) described transactional leaders as occurring when “one person takes the
initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of value things”
(p. 19). On the other hand, transformational leadership occurs “when one or more
persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another
to higher levels of motivation and morality” (p. 20). While Burns recognized the
efficacy of both forms of leadership he concluded that transformational leadership,
with a strong moral dimension, was associated with effective leadership in times of
instability and destabilizing change and was more enduring than transactional
leadership.
Burns’s work attracted the attention of management researchers mired in a period
characterized by frustration and a lack of progress in regard to leadership theory
(Hunt, 1999). Bass and his colleagues further developed and operationalized the
concept of transformational leadership and created an instrument for its measurement,
the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Bass, 1985a; Bass and Avolio, 1990).
Utilizing factor analysis, Bass and Avolio (1990) extracted the four categories of
transformational leadership behavior described in Table II. An overall measure of
transformational leadership consists of the aggregate of the four subscale measures.
These measures are part of the MLQ which has been determined to be a reliable
instrument for the measurement of transformational leadership (Bass and Avolio,
1990; Lowe et al., 1996). Although there have been alternative operational definitions of
transformational leadership (Kouzes and Posner, 1988; Tichy and Devanna, 1990;
Podsakoff et al., 1990) none of them have gained the level of utilization of the MLQ nor
have they been subjected to equivalent levels of validly or reliability test as has the
MLQ (Cole et al., 2006).
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