Peter Pre­vos, 30 May 2008.

One’s own is well hid­den for one’s
own; and of all treas­ure troves, one’s
own is the last to be excavated …

Friedrich Niet­z­sche, Also Sprach Zarathus­tra.[1. Niet­z­sche, F. (1990). Alzo sprach Zarathus­tra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. In
Hauptwerk (Vol. III). Mün­schen: Nymphen­bur­ger. Trans­lated by the author.]

The import­ance of self-knowledge has been acknow­ledged through the ages and across cul­tures. A vis­itor to the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece was com­manded to “Know Thy­self” and Chinese philo­sopher Lao Tzu wrote that “self-knowledge is enlightenment”.[2. Pausanias. (1995). Descrip­tion of Greece I. In W. H. S. Jones (Ed.), Loeb Clas­sical Lib­rary (Vol. 93); Lao Tzu. (1963). Tao te ching (D. Lau, Ed.). Lon­don: Pen­guin Books.]

Self-knowledge is dif­fer­ent from know­ledge of the object­ive world.[3. Gertler, B. (2003) Self know­ledge. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stan­ford encyc­lo­pe­dia of philo­sophy. Avail­able at plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge, down­loaded 18 May 2008.] It is, by defin­i­tion, sub­ject­ive and is thus not eas­ily obtained, as illus­trated by the epi­graph. Sig­mund Freud and Carl Rogers, two of the most influ­en­tial psy­cho­ther­ap­ists of the last cen­tury, the­or­ised that people have a hid­den per­son­al­ity of which they are not aware.[4. Pre­vos P. (2005),  Hid­den per­son­al­it­ies accord­ing to Freud and Rogers. Avail­able: www.prevos.net. Down­loaded 20 May 2008.] It is this hid­den, sub­con­scious, nature of per­son­al­ity that cre­ates epi­stem­o­lo­gical hurdles and makes self-knowledge a dif­fi­cult to obtain treasure.

Con­tem­por­ary man­age­ment thinkers also recog­nise the import­ance of self-knowledge and have linked it to improved man­age­ment per­form­ance and sub­sequently the suc­cess of the organisation.[5. Bourner, T. (1996). ‘Per­sonal devel­op­ment to improve man­age­ment per­form­ance’. Man­age­ment Devel­op­ment Review, 9 (6), 4; McMa­hon, T. J. (1992). Teach­ing man­age­ment to MBA stu­dents: The issue of ped­agogy’ Journal of Mana­gerial Psy­cho­logy, 7 (1), 21–25; Smith, B. (1993). ‘Build­ing man­agers from the inside out. Devel­op­ing man­agers through competency-based action learn­ing’. Journal of Man­age­ment Devel­op­ment 12 (1), 43–48.] Many dif­fer­ent psy­cho­met­ric tests have been developed to determ­ine a subject’s per­son­al­ity or other aspects of the self. These tests are used in clin­ical set­tings and research, but are also widely used for recruit­ment and lead­er­ship development.[6. Michael, J. (2003). Using the Myers-Briggs type indic­ator as a tool for lead­er­ship devel­op­ment? Apply with cau­tion. Journal of Lead­er­ship and Organ­iz­a­tional Stud­ies 10 (1), 68–81.]

For my MBA stud­ies I was asked to under­take a bat­tery of per­son­al­ity and motiv­a­tion tests in an attempt to improve my self know­ledge. The main ques­tion to be answered is whether this myriad of num­bers and clas­si­fic­a­tions actu­ally describe me as a per­son and whether they can provide a deeper self-knowledge to enable me to be a bet­ter manager.

Numer­ous stud­ies have shown that psy­cho­met­ric tests can be used to make pre­dic­tions about beha­viour of indi­vidu­als and job per­form­ance. There are, how­ever, many situ­ational vari­ables, such as organ­isa­tional cul­ture, which influ­ence beha­viour and research indic­ates that per­son­al­ity plays the greatest role in situ­ations where there are no social clues on how to behave.[7. Gray, P. (2002). Psy­cho­logy (4th ed.). New York: Worth Pub­lish­ers; Rob­bins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2007).Organ­iz­a­tional beha­vior (12th ed.). New Jer­sey: Pear­son Pren­tice Hall.]

Some of the often used meth­od­o­lo­gies are sci­en­tific­ally prob­lem­atic. There is little empir­ical evid­ence to con­firm the valid­ity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indic­ator. Also for The­ory X/Y and ERG The­ory there is little or no evid­ence to con­firm the valid­ity of their assumptions.[8. Lorr M. (1991) An empir­ical eval­u­ation of the MBTI typo­logy. Per­son­al­ity and Indi­vidual Dif­fer­ences, 11 (12), 1141–1145; Michael (2003); Rob­bins & Judge (2007)].

Prob­lem­atic aspect of self admin­istered psy­cho­met­ric test­ing is a high level of inher­ent con­firm­a­tion bias, also known as the ‘Forer Effect’.[9. Forer, B. R. (1949). The fal­lacy of per­sonal val­id­a­tion: A classroom demon­stra­tion of gull­ib­il­ity. Journal of Abnor­mal Psy­cho­logy, 44 (1), 118–123.] Am I really very con­scien­tious, or do I per­ceive myself to be con­scien­tious? Am I really an extro­ver­ted per­son, or is it my high level of energy which sub­jug­ates any innate intro­ver­ted­ness? Do the res­ults of these tests provide a pic­ture of my inner self, or are they a reflec­tion of my per­ceived self?

The test res­ults do not actu­ally reveal any inform­a­tion bey­ond what has been entered by me, because the res­ults are only a lin­guistic rearrange­ment of the answers. This is con­firmed by recent research that showed that most people are able to guess the out­come of per­son­al­ity tests without actu­ally under­tak­ing them.[10. Fur­nham, A., & Dis­sou, G. (2007). The rela­tion­ship between self-estimated and test-derived scores of per­son­al­ity and intel­li­gence. Journal of Indi­vidual Dif­fer­ences 28 (1), 37–44.]

Com­pre­hens­ive self-knowledge can thus not be obtained by com­plet­ing sur­veys because they can only reveal the per­ceived self and are not cap­able of unearth­ing the inner (sub­con­scious) self. Psy­cho­met­ric tests are suit­able only as a vehicle for intro­spec­tion, provid­ing an entry point for reflect­ing on one’s self. This intro­spec­tion can, how­ever, not occur without life exper­i­ence to reflect on.

Obtain­ing self know­ledge, con­sidered essen­tial for lead­er­ship devel­op­ment, requires some­thing deeper and more sub­stan­tial, as alluded to by Niet­z­sche in the epi­graph to this blog entry. As our beha­viour is pre­dom­in­ately con­trolled by situ­ational vari­ables, the only way to obtain self-knowledge is life experience.

Only by being exposed to a mul­ti­tude of situ­ations and chal­lenges can we know what our per­son­al­ity actu­ally is. As we gain life exper­i­ence, our inner and per­ceived selves slowly con­verge. Matur­ity is the situ­ation were the inner self and the per­ceived self are almost identical and self-knowledge becomes appar­ent. Even the most care­fully designed per­son­al­ity test can not leapfrog the know­ledge obtained through life exper­i­ence. Carl Gustav Jung, who inspired devel­op­ment of the MBTI recog­nised this when he wrote:

“Any­one who wants to know the human psyche … would be bet­ter advised to aban­don exact sci­ence … and wander with human heart through the world.”[11. Jung, C. (1999). Two essays on ana­lyt­ical psy­cho­logy (2nd ed.). Lon­don: Routledge.]

This foray into psy­cho­met­ric test­ing leaves me to con­clude that no psy­cho­met­ric test can ever replace the full­ness of life exper­i­ence to obtain true self-knowledge. Exper­i­ences such as expos­ing one­self to a chal­len­ging situ­ations, occa­sion­ally explor­ing the bound­ar­ies of mor­al­ity, exper­i­en­cing dif­fer­ent cul­tures or going through emo­tional tur­moil are the only mean­ing­ful ways to gain self-knowledge.

Notes