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