Understanding the "Business Type": A Comparitive Analysis of Management Students and Business Executives

Study of personality type has contributed a lot to our understanding and prediction of human behaviour, especially in organizational contexts. A great deal of interest is especially focused on what types of people are most effective in different management environments. This study aimed to identify differences in psychological types of management students and business executives using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It investigated two research objectives (a) to identify the psychological types of management students and business executives (b) to compare the average psychological types of management students and business executives for differences on four MBTI dimensions . extraversion-introversion (EI), sensing-intuition (SN), thinking-feeling (TF), and judging-perceiving (JP), Empirical analysis of data collected from 119 respondents (management students and business executives) revealed that the average .psychological type. of management students was INTJ while that of business executives was ISTJ. While there was no significant difference between the two groups on extraversion/introversion and thinking/feeling dimensions, business executives appeared to be to more sensing and judging types on an average than management students. The implications of these findings for both management practice and education are discussed in the paper.