What About the Diversity of Psychological Types? A Study with Emerging Economy Executive Education Alumni

Creativity and the ability to innovate are commonly pointed to as being core attributes of the competencies that organizations need to differentiate themselves and obtain comparative advantages in the competitive world of contemporary business. This premise has led to countless organizations requiring that the professionals they employ be creative, as opposed to having purely a command-control profile. Given this context, the main objective of this article is to investigate a sample of 7,924 graduates of executive development programs. These were alumni from more than 40 year-groups of executive education courses that were offered by a business school headquartered in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and who between 2010 and 2016 underwent a MBTI instrument, a device for measuring individual psychological preferences (Myers & Myers, 1997) that was developed from Jung’s psychological types (Jung, 2013a). The expectation was that it would be possible to see by how much the profiles of these alumni had changed over the period investigated, with an increase in the psychological function, Intuition, as either dominant or auxiliary in the psychological types. The results, however, demonstrate a high preponderance of the Thinking and Sensing preferences, which are associated with command-control type professional profiles. The Intuition and Perceiving profiles, which are commonly related to creativity and innovation, had the lowest incidences throughout the historical series that was investigated.