if you told a man in the 1950s that he would be pathologised for work purposes he'd have laughed. And got the union on you. Now its like they want a fucking voight-kampff before they'll let you empty the bins
Like anything, this stuff can be used constructively, or not. And it's worth remembering that it's only a fairly broad-brush assessment in any case.
But people like these classifications, and they can be useful at least as indicators of what we might find easy or difficult. A lot of introverted types battle through life thinking there must be something wrong with them that they don't want to go out partying and being sociable all the time, like those noisy extrovert types, and it's only when they realise that it's an underlying trait that they are able to make sense of it, and work more within their own capabilities.
Where it is wrong is if such techniques start being used to screen people for jobs, promotions, etc - they're just not indicative of people's strengths and weakness - in my view - to be reliable enough for that. And so much depends on interpretation, too.
For that matter, pretty much any statistical abstraction is open to abuse: in a job I had, we were scoring clients on the CORE scale at the start and end of the work. Despite assurances that this was just a measure of "distance travelled", and that it was not being used in a comparative way (there's all kinds of good reasons why that would be problematic), yup, you guessed, within a year they were tabulating the results for the team and wondering out loud why X achieved a distance travelled of 3.4, while Y was only managing 2.1.
I'm slightly angsty about all this stuff, because I'm trying to develop a coaching business, and while I can see the merits, I don't think that barrelling into an organisation with an armful of personality typing tests, and scaling charts for everything from learning style to team-orientedness, is really the way to go...and it costs a fucking FORTUNE to get accredited/licenced for each of these various tricksy tools. I think a lot of what is done using them can be equally well achieved through some decent one-to-one stuff, even before you start doing 360 degree reviews, and all of the rest of the management-friendly bollocks that's out there.
But, so long as nobody's taking them
too seriously, or making profound decisions on the strength of them, there's no harm in it.
