USING MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR (MBTI) FOR
ASSESSMENT SUCCESS OF STUDENT GROUPS IN PROJECT
BASED LEARNING
Vicente Rodríguez Montequín, Joaquín Villanueva Balsera
José Manuel Mesa Fernández and Javier De Cos Juez
Area de Proyectos de Ingeniería, Universidad de Oviedo, C/Independencia 13, 33004 Oviedo, Spain
Keywords: Project management, Project based learning, Collaborative projects, Learning through projects, MBTI.
Abstract: One of the most used teaching methodologies nowadays is project based learning: organizing students in
small groups and provide them with a real-life project to manage with. Group work on a real-life project is a
very interesting teaching instrument since groups act as project teams and the project ideas are close to the
student field of professional interest. In addition to the technical skills, there are other aspects influencing
the result under this paradigm: management and personality. The students should work in a collaborative
way in order to achieve the best outcomes. This methodology is very effective for learning and a high
student motivation and satisfaction could be reached, but usually conflicts between group members arise,
resulting in poor results. The source of conflicts could often be found in the different personalities among
group members. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has become one of the most widely-used
psychometric instruments for assessing personality characteristics regarding work environment. It postulates
that four different behaviour stiles give rise to four separate but interrelated ranges of personal preferences
or natural tendencies in a given situation. The MBTI suggests that every personality type has a behaviour
that could be used to explain some kind of conflicts. Knowing more about the personality of the team
members and how different personalities compliment or conflict with each other can be useful information
for building and leading a students’ group. The results of this study have implications for assessment the
success of student groups working in collaborative projects.
1 INTRODUCTION
Group work on a project is a very interesting
teaching instrument, since student groups act as
project teams and the project ideas are close to their
field of professional interest. This paradigm is often
called Project-based learning (PBL), that is an
instructional methodology in which students learn
important skills by doing actual projects. Students
apply core academic skills and creativity to solve
authentic problems in real world situations. Students
use a wide range of tools and the culminating
projects are tangible and observable artifacts that
serve as evidence of what the students have learned.
This paradigm is commonly used in technological
studies, mainly in Higher Education, and it is
becoming even more important in relation to the
Bolonia new teaching methodologies. Students
learn best when they are actively involved in the
process. Researchers report that, regardless of the
subject matter, students working in small groups
tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it
longer than when the same content is presented in
other instructional formats. Students who work in
collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with
their classes. Project-based learning is based on the
constructivist learning theory, which finds that
learning is deeper and more meaningful when
students are involved in constructing their own
knowledge. Students are given the opportunity to
select a topic that interests them within the required
content framework and then they are responsible for
creating their project plan. Rather than a lecturer,
typically, the teacher's role is that of an academic
advisor, mentor, facilitator, task master and
evaluator.
Usually the achieved outcomes are very good,
and the level of involvement of students is very
high. But, despite considerable potential, project-
based learning is not without its challenges. One of
156
Rodríguez Montequín V., Villanueva Balsera J., Manuel Mesa Fernández J. and De Cos Juez J. (2010).
USING MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR (MBTI) FOR ASSESSMENT SUCCESS OF STUDENT GROUPS IN PROJECT BASED LEARNING.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 156-160
DOI: 10.5220/0002859901560160
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

the most important is that members should work in a
successful collaborative way. Under this situation,
many conflicts among members could arise, mainly
due to human aspects, for instance, different
personalities and students’ emotions. These conflicts
could turn a successful project into an unsuccessful
one, disabling the collaborative work. After several
years using project based learning in the engineering
environment, it has been observed that some kind of
conflicts appear more frecuently when some
combinations of personalities coexists in the group.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) could be
useful finding this kind of combinations, and so
forming an assessment tool for the group success.
2 THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE
INDICATOR
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been,
for more than fifty years, one of the most trusted and
widely used instruments in the world for
determining the personality type. This tool was
developed by Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs
(Myers and Briggs, 1980), based on Carl G. Jung’s
work (Jung, 1988) of psychological types. This
theory explains that differences in human behaviour
are simply the result of a few variations in mental
functioning. These differences relate to how people
prefer to use their minds, and particularly how they
perceive and make judgments, which are called
functions. There are four groups, each one consisting
of two opposite preferences:
1. Focus of Attention:
¾ Extrovert (E): Those who relate best to the
outer world. They are comfortable in
talking and sharing with others. They gain
their energy from working with groups.
¾ Introvert (I): Those who relate best to their
inner self. They are comfortable in working
quietly alone. They drain their energy from
interactions in a group.
2. Seeking Information:
¾ Sensing (S): Those who rely on facts,
reality and no nonsense. They focus on the
details. When asked to review a document,
they like to find typographical errors and
misspellings.
¾ Intuitive (N): Those who use intuition,
speculation, possibilities and imagination.
They focus on the big picture. When asked
to review a document, they like to identify
problems in how the topic in the document
was developed.
3. Decision-Making:
¾ Thinking (T): Decisions are made by using
sound principles, laws, policy and criteria.
Thinkers are analytical, logical, and
objective.
¾ Feeling (F): Decisions are made by values,
devotion, sympathy, and harmony. Feelers
will take the emotions and opinions of
others into consideration when making a
decision. They have a strong need to
maintain harmony within a group.
4. Relationships with the World:
¾ Judging (J): They are outcome-oriented,
regulated, and decisive. They make
decisions quickly. Judging members like to
get things settled or come to a closure.
¾ Perceiving (P): They are process-oriented,
flexible, and open-minded. They make
decisions slowly. Perceiving members like
to get additional information or consider a
new possibility.
Using the MBTI, every individual’s personality
type can be described through four variables of two
opposite states, which makes up a total of sixteen
possible personalities (figure 1). For example, if a
person takes the MBTI test and the type reported is
ISTJ, means that has preferences for Introversion,
Sensing, Thinking and Judging.
Figure 1: MBTI grid (Source: Max Wideman).
Knowing more about the team member
personality and how different personalities
compliment or conflict can be useful information in
building and leading a project team. For example,
MacDonald (MacDonald et al., 1986) highlighted
the characteristics of design teams that include
USING MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR (MBTI) FOR ASSESSMENT SUCCESS OF STUDENT GROUPS IN
PROJECT BASED LEARNING
157

leadership, conflict, communication, size, team
maturity, coordination, and cohesiveness. Prince
(Prince A., Brannick, Prince C. and Salas, 1992)
identified six skills of team process behaviours:
leadership, assertiveness, decision-making, mission
analysis, situation awareness, communication,
adaptability and flexibility. Sundstrom (Sundstrom,
DeMeuse and Futrell, 1990) emphasized the
important factor to be an effective team, such as
organizational structure and culture, mature
communication, group stability over time,
experience, small group, and personality traits. The
flexibility and involvement of teamwork also help
ensure the quality of team performace (Campion,
Medsker and Higgs, 1993) (Stinson, 1990). The
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that has become one
of the most widely-used psychometric instruments
for assessing personality characteristics regarding to
work environment, could be very useful performing
an assessment of those features.
Keirsey and Bates (Keirsey and Bates, 1984)
have identified the distribution of personality types
through the sixteen cells of the four by four MBTI
grid. By using this as a basis for comparison, we can
gain an interesting insight into the availability of
people suited to various roles in project work. The
personality styles and their preferences represented
by each cell in the grid reflect the interaction of
various combinations of temperaments, rather than
the individual temperaments on their own. The
descriptions provided by the MBTI give valuable
insight into the differences between regular people.
These differences can be the source of much
difficulty in understanding and communication,
attributes that are so important in project teamwork.
The most effective teams should have a good
combination of personality types.
To ensure a successful team, it is important to
understand the characteristics of team members. To
build a successful project team, teamwork capability
of team members is needed by taking their
experience, communication skills, and flexibility in
job assignment into account. Personality profiling
using Myers-Briggs type indicator serves as the
basis of assessing each team member's abilities to
work with others.
But inside the team not all the members have the
same relevance. In project based learning, there is
usually a student playing the role of project
manager. The behaviour of this student is very
important because he is responsible for coordinating
a leading the group. The team performance depends
most of the times on the leadership style of this key
role. The MBTI theory has also applied for
featuring the personality of project managers.
Shenhar and Wideman (Shenhar and Wideman,
2000) reported on the personality characteristics of
project managers. Their analysis shows that indeed
many MBTI types might be suited for project
managers while others are not. However, they state
that the ESTJ type is a favored type of project
managers. Smith in his research (Smith, 2001)
confirmed Shenhar and Wideman’s work and found
the four outer quadrants of the 16 types in the MBTI
table as suitable for project management. Mills
(Mills, Robey and Smith, 1985) using the MBTI also
found that traditional managers were either ESTJ or
ISTJ, the S being the dominant characteristic for
project managers. Black and Slaker (Black and
Seaker, 2004) found that NT (intuitive thinking)
types had greater leadership tendencies.
Wideman and Shenhar (figure 2) also state that
there is a relationship between some type of
personality types and their leadership style
(coordinator, administrator, explorer or driver).
These styles could be translated to the well known
Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid descriptions.
Figure 2: The MBTI Grid and Suitability to Project
Management Teamwork (Source: Max Wideman).
According to the classification of the figure 2,
group members could be tagged as ‘suitable project
managers’, followers or unsuited.
3 PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES
Students from Oviedo University enrolled in the last
course of Industrial Engineering have been taking
the MBTI personality test in order to assess their
personality types for the last four years. More than
30 groups of students have been assessed, with a
total of 400 students overall. It has been assessed
whether there could be a relation between the
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combination of MBTI personality types and the
quality of the output works developed by the
students. In order to assess the quality of the
resulting works, some criteria have been considered:
1. Technical qualities.
2. Quality of documentation presented.
3. Management of team work.
The technical quality shows aspects as the
adequacy and scope of the project, fulfillment of
requirements, use of innovative techniques,
adequacy to a real-life environment, realism in
project estimation and detailed planning.
The quality of documentation reflects whether it
is well adjusted to the demands of structural
documentation for project management, with a clear
and smooth writing. Detail and clarity of exposition
is also considered.
Work groups work together as a project team,
one of them taking the role as the project manager.
This project leader takes a secretary as his assistant
in management tasks. Groups are formed by 10-15
students each.
The tasks of the professor are of a double nature:
speaking both on behalf of the customer, guiding the
students on contents and focus of the project, and
also from a pedagogical approach as their tutor.
Group monitoring is made through weekly
sessions. The aim of this meetings is to present the
work already done, discuss possible technical
aspects and the planning of due work. Minutes are
also a part of this monitoring process, reflecting
what has been said and done in every work meeting.
Students have a website at their disposal, to
upload work documents, also including discussion
forums to communicate with each other and raise
any doubt. These forums are also monitored as part
of the groups’ assessment.
Analyzing the failed projects carried out during
these years, lack of internal coordination was
detected as the most recurrent cause explaining
failure to achieve the expected results in certain
groups. A relationship could be observed between
the MBTI profiles of the members and some cases of
poor coordination and internal conflicts. For
example, two of the most conflictive groups were
composed with similar types: there were a high
number of members with the same profile. In both
cases, almost all the members of the group were
ISTJ. Also in both groups there were conflicts
between members of the groups. Most of the
conflicts happened with ‘unsuited’ members
according to figure 2. Nevertheless, other groups
reaching a high level result, show more balanced
mix of profiles.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we presented a suggestion about the
influence of different personality types over students
in Project-Based Learning. MBTI, is one of the most
used personality profiling regarding to working
relationships. MBTI is a tool with intent not to
stereotype, but to allow understanding of individual
preferences to facilitate all aspects of life:
differences in learning and communication styles,
conflict management, and relationships. As
presented in the paper, previous experiences of
students taking MBTI test and using PBL for several
years, show that there is a relationship between the
result success and the different member profiles.
Considering this situation, MBTI could be useful for
the assessment of the team success, or at least to be
prepared to face some kind of conflicts depending
on the combination of profiles.
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