What is management for?” asked the front page of L’Express on November 10, 1969, when “the word and the thing that arrived from America after the war” were in their infancy in French companies. Fifty-five years later, management, its teaching and practice are everywhere. In open spaces, sport, administration, business schools, bookstores and sometimes even in places where you don’t expect it, like these training courses which offer “working on foot with a horse to strengthen cohesion teamwork and rapid decision-making. Coaching galorepopular HR gadget tools, personal development books… Never have executives been so inundated with speeches and pseudo-techniques supposed to make their jobs easier.
Like all human and social sciences, management does not necessarily lend itself to hard sciences. But the numerous research studies published over the past half-century – and too often ignored by companies – shed light on which methods have proven themselves and which have not. L’Express reviews some of them. In this second episode, it’s time for personality tests.
EPISODE 1. From Teams to WhatsApp… The damage notifications have on our concentration at work
Are you a blue (compliant) or a yellow (influential)? An ISTJ (introversion, feeling, thinking, judging) or an ENFP (extroversion, intuition, feeling, perception)? The author of these lines (a red) can attest to this: there is nothing like a personality test to brighten up management training courses that are often very boring. The objective: to know yourself better, but also to better understand your relationships with your colleagues. The problem is that what makes these tests successful – putting people into boxes – precisely represents their main methodological weakness.
“Personality cannot be measured by boxes”
Created in the 1960s on the basis of Carl Jung’s “psychological types”, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, distinguishes for example 16 profiles, based on four axes (extroversion/introversion, sensation/intuition, thinking/feeling, judgment/perception). “Already, the underlying theory, that of Jung, is old and does not take into consideration more recent knowledge,” notes Franck Ramus, researcher in cognitive sciences at the CNRS and the ENS. Then, from one test to the next, you have a 50% chance of changing categories. More simplistic, the Disc test, created in 1928, ranks personalities into four colors: red (dominant), yellow (influential), green (stable) and blue (compliant or conscientious). Openly esoteric and popularized by the occultist Georges Gurdjieff at the beginning of the 20th century, the enneagram highlights nine personalities based on eccentric criteria (the romantic, the fighter, the epicurean, etc.). The Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Abuses (Miviludes) also places it in its list of risky practices.
“All these approaches which try to place people in boxes give unreliable results, because personality cannot be measured by boxes, but by continuous dimensions,” says Franck Ramus. Scientific psychologists advocate the much more recent Big Five model, which aims to describe five dimensions of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). The Big Five do not classify people into categories, but place them on a continuous axis, with a score allowing them to position themselves in relation to the rest of the population. For example, on the neuroticism axis, people who are very anxious and emotionally unstable will find themselves at one end, those who are unmoved by anything at the other. “But in general, the distribution is Gaussian. Which means that most people are in the middle of a dimension, and therefore have an average personality. However, tests that try to place them in categories cut precisely in the middle, many people can move to one side or the other depending on the moment”, notes Franck Ramus.
The researcher sees two possible uses of the Big Five in business. For recruitment, the personality test can complement CVs, interviews or skills tests. “In general, we especially want to recruit competent employees, even if we can understand that we want to avoid psychopaths [rires]. Afterwards, psychopaths are quite good at hiding and avoiding embarrassing questions.” The Big Five can also be used for management and interpersonal relations. “But companies prefer tests that put people in boxes, because it leads to easy recipes: if you are a certain type of personality and you are dealing with another type, you have to act in such a way…”, sighs Franck Ramus. Colors and four-letter acronyms therefore still have a bright future ahead of them .
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