Many of the standard models and frameworks used in business management owe their origin to research conducted with a US American or Anglo-Saxon signature. We do not wish to overly criticize well established models like Myers-Briggs MBTI personality profiling, Belbin's Team Analysis or Kirton's KAI Adaptation Inventory. Our interest is to see if we can extend these models so that they might be more appropriate when seeking to transfer them to other cultures or multi-cultural situations.
For instance, we know from our own cross-cultural profiling instruments that US and UK managers tend to be more individualistic and Japanese managers more team-oriented. So, as long as American managers remain in the US managing Americans and the Japanese stay in Japan, then presumably there is no problem. But in today’s multi-cultural world, an American leader could be running a team overseas with Korean, Japanese and French members.
Our concern is that, too often, these frameworks to categorize people according to mutual exclusivity. - Why, if you are a “judging” person, can you not also be a “perceiving person”?
- Why, if you are an “individualist”, can you not also be a “team player” (collectivist)? The problem derives from the notion that you can only be one type or the other. For example, Lenore Thomson defines each dimension with the use of “either” and “or”: We can either analyze impersonally (T) or evaluate personally (F).
But why are these questionnaires designed on mutually exclusive values? It is because our Western thinking is based on Cartesian logic and forces us to describe something as either one thing or the other, rather than entertaining several possibilities at once or seeing how one thing can lead to another.
