MBTI or SIGMA Personality? A Comparison of Personality Assessments

Personality assessments are tools designed to evaluate and understand various aspects of an individual’s character and behavioral tendencies. These assessments are commonly used in both personal development and organizational settings to help individuals gain insights into their own personalities, enhance team dynamics, and inform hiring and development decisions. By measuring different personality traits or types, these tools can provide valuable information that supports personal growth, enhances workplace relationships, and optimizes job performance.

In this article, we compare two notable personality assessments: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and SIGMA Personality. While the MBTI focuses on categorizing individuals into distinct personality types based on their preferences, SIGMA Personality offers a detailed analysis of broad personality traits and their underlying facets. Understanding the differences between these two assessments can help determine which tool is best suited for specific purposes, whether it’s for individual insight, team building, or organizational decision-making. Let’s delve into the features, applications, and strengths of each assessment to provide a detailed comparison.

What is SIGMA Personality?

SIGMA Personality is a comprehensive personality assessment tool that builds upon the foundations of the Personality Research Form (PRF),¹ the Five-Factor Model,² and the HEXACO model.³ SIGMA Personality assesses both broad personality factors, which are overarching dimensions of personality, and narrow personality traits, which are specific characteristics under each broad factor. This assessment sheds light on an individual’s behavior and performance across various situations, including in the workplace.

SIGMA Personality’s broad personality factors include:

Each of these broad factors is measured by six personality traits, or facets, which are representative of the components of personality covered by the broad factor. For example, the broad factor of Industriousness includes the following six facets: Achievement, Competitiveness, Energy Level, Engagement, Hard-Working, and Persistence. These facets are measured by subscales which consist of statements (also referred to as “items”) that test-takers rate on a 5-point scale, tied to how strongly they identify with each item. Results are presented on a continuum of scores, reflecting the degree to which the test-taker exhibits each trait. SIGMA Personality is, therefore, a continuous measure of personality.

What is the MBTI?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an assessment inspired by Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types.⁴ Unlike assessments that measure personality traits on a continuum, the MBTI categorizes individuals into distinct personality types based on their preferences. Simply put, it is a typological measure of personality.

The MBTI groups individuals into one of 16 distinct personality types, determined by their preferences across four key dichotomies:

• Extraversion vs. Introversion
• Sensing vs. Intuition
• Thinking vs. Feeling
• Judging vs. Perceiving

Responses are classified into two distinct categories, such that individuals are either “Extraverted” or “Introverted,” or “Thinking” or “Feeling,” and so on.

MBTI vs. SIGMA Personality: Utility and Applications Explained

MBTI

As a typological measure of personality, the MBTI categorizes individuals into distinct personality types and is most effective as a development tool for employees.

It can be useful in situations such as:

• Aiding leaders in discovering how to manage others effectively.
• Increasing insight and self-awareness into one’s own personality.
• Recognizing how individuals’ unique combination of traits, values, and motivations may influence their behavior.

The MBTI assessment provides a simplified snapshot of personality, but individual differences are much more complex and nuanced than this model can capture.⁵ The accuracy and validity of a personality scale is contingent on its empirical grounding and ability to predict important work-related outcomes.⁶ However, there is little-to-no empirical research supporting typological measures such as the MBTI, especially their ability to predict job performance. As such, using the MBTI in administrative decisions and prediction of employee behavior is highly discouraged.^7,8

SIGMA Personality

Unlike typological assessments, SIGMA Personality assesses specific traits along a continuum, offering a more detailed and accurate picture of personality. This tool is highly useful for:

• Hiring and selection processes.
• Administrative decisions regarding employees.
• Prediction of employee behavior, such as truancy.
• Identifying strengths and areas for improvement.
  

Instead of categorizing people into types, SIGMA Personality provides numerical scores that reflect where an individual falls on a range for each personality trait. This approach offers more detail than simply assigning a trait label. The assessment also includes standardized scores, making it easy to see whether someone scores low, average, or high on a given trait. These comparison-based insights are particularly valuable in situations where precision is essential, such as in hiring decisions. For example, understanding traits associated with counterproductive work behaviors, such as low scores on the Honesty/Humility scale, can provide deeper insights into employee behavior and inform strategies to mitigate negative outcomes. In organizational settings, SIGMA Personality’s detailed reporting of traits like Self-Discipline, Engagement, and Hard-Working can provide meaningful perspectives into a potential employee’s workplace behavior and organizational fit.^{9, 10, 11} This makes SIGMA Personality highly effective for selection and recruitment.

Response Validity

Both SIGMA Personality and the MBTI rely on honest self-reporting from test-takers. This carries its own set of limitations, especially in organizational contexts, where the test-taker is incentivized to exaggerate some of their positive qualities and minimize their flaws in order to appear more desirable to employers.¹²

In order to mitigate this limitation, SIGMA Personality uses a collection of items within the measure for response validation, providing an index of impression management. Respondents with high scores on this scale are likely to claim highly desirable virtues that are rarely true. In such cases, the results should be validated with additional sources of information. In contrast, the MBTI does not include validity scales to detect desirable responding, so the validity of an individual’s results cannot be verified.