Jung's personality Theory

Carl Gustav Jung .

In the following it will be explained how Jung saw the mind and especially how it can be used I management when different teams and workgroups are formed. Projects managers are facing 3 main problems today; The complexity of projects, how humans are going to behave in different environments and situations and the many uncertainty’s in a project. How to deal with human factors on projects will be the focus of this article.

Because projects today are more complicated then seen in the past it is often necessary to form work taskforces that mix different types of people. People with different curriculums are put together to best and most efficiently solve the given tasks. Today’s open culture and dynamics of company’s forces the work environments to constantly reform and evolve the workgroups. Because these groups often are temporary it is crucial that the team is grouped efficiently before the project can be a success.

To form a successful group, you must have a basic understanding of all the potential group members. This includes understanding how each person is motivated, how they gather information and how they make decisions. A projects manager needs to ensure that every team members skills are put to best use and that the way they interact is properly received by the fellow team members. With a clear understanding of each team members psyche a project manager can assign the right tasks to the right people, not only based on their individual expertise areas.

The basis on understanding human behaver is based on the work of psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. His research was centered around the psychoanalyses of humans and is today very often used to coordinate and make teams in work situations. If a project manager understands the basis of Jung’s personality theory’s he will be capable of grouping teams based on their individual personality trades. If teams are grouped based on this theory the team will complement each other and many conflicts can be avoided. Jung meant that people was defined by their characteristics within the following three groups:

• Extraversion – introversion
• Sensing – intuition
• Thinking – feeling

Jung’s work is built around different personality types and analysis of dreams. During his professional life, he was very influenced by Freud and big parts of Jung’s work is developed on Freuds thoughts of the human mind. Freud and Jung came to a professional disagreement and this caused them to go their separate ways both personally and professionally. This was due to Freuds focus on the past and Jung’s focus on the present. Jung meant that the present had much more influence on the mind than the past. Jung’s personality theory is especially of interest for project managers because it connects the psychoanalysis way of thinking with today’s personality tests. This is because Jung, opposed to e.g. Freud, sees the individual mind as energy that influences the future of the individual. The energy decides how the future should look like and therefore forms e.g. hope, goals, desires etc. for the future. Where is many like Freud only focused on the past.

Carl Gustav Jung

C. G. Jung was born in Switzerland on the 26. Of July 1875 and died the 6. Of June 1961. Jung was a psychiatrist and later also became a psychoanalyst at the Burghölzli hospital, which is the psychiatric hospital of Zürich university. During Jung’s career, he founded the analytical psychology and is today especially known for his work with dream analysis, human psyche and personality theory.

As Jung became more and more famous for his work, Sigmund Freud reached out and the two men decided to collaborate on a joint vision regarding the human psychology. Because of this cooperation between the two, Jung’s work became very influenced by Freud’s visions and their work can in some aspect be difficult to distinguish between. Eventually Jung choose to focus on the present while Freud continued to focus on the past and the subject’s child hood. This led to a break between the two, which had a personal and a work vise influence on Jung.

Jung’s focus on the present day is what makes his personality theory’s especially relevant for project managers. One of Jung’s central concepts was the individuation. This concept is a part of the analytical psychology and is the concept on how humans has a lifelong process of differentiation of the self-persona. According to Jung the consciousness and unconsciousness of the individual is in a lifelong process of differentiating the self-persona. One part of this concept is the extraversion and introversion aspects, which will be explained in detail later in the article.

Jung’s perspective on the mind

Jung saw the mind as two different parts and how they interacted on each other. He distinguished between the persona and the shadow of the mind. The persona is defined as how we present ourselves to the world, the picture we let others see. While our shadow is the compressed part of us. The shadow often hides our fears and flaws. Besides this Jung noted that the mind consists of a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is the persons own memories and experiences while the collective unconscious is the experiences of the species that have been past trough by our DNA. Jung described the different types of conscious and unconscious personality’s as archetypes. These types are universal and can be used to identify our persona and therefore get a deeper understanding of why different people act as they do. From greek the word arche means original and typos means pattern. The Archetypes is in its basic 12 different personality types that describes the original pattern of a mind.

Jung’s 12 archetypes .

Personality types

Jung distinguish between to bases of personalities, extroverts and introverts. If a person is categorized as extrovert the person is very outgoing and prefers to be among people to socialize. In opposite, the introvert person prefers to be alone and is much more comfortable in his own company. In other words, an introvert is stimulated from within himself while an extrovert person gets stimulated by outside environments. Jung himself explained this in one of his books:

"....The introvert's attitude to the object is an abstracting one.... he is always facing the problem of how libido can be withdrawn from the object...... The extravert, on the contrary, maintains a positive relation to the object. To such an extent does he affirm its importance that his subjective attitude is continually being orientated by, and related to the object...." Psychological Types by C. G. Jung 1921 .

As an example, we could look at Julie. Julie prefers to spend her Friday night out with friends and often she has plans the entire weekend. She loves to interact with lots of different people and she probably has a big circle of friends. On the contrary Dan prefers to stay home, read books and watch movies by himself all weekend. Dan most likely only have few, but close friends. Julie is an extrovert while Dan is an introvert person. However, it is important to know that there is no such person that is 100 % extrovert or introvert, as Jung also said himself:

"There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum. " C. G. Jung .

When people are grouped into introvert – extroverts Jung subdivides people even further. People are categorized after how they perceive the world and how they make decisions. Jung categorize after the following four groups, called the functional types:

The irrational functions - How we perceive environments and gather information

• Sensing - When a person is in this group the person likes to use aesthetics in everyday situations. The person prefers that everything is in line, symmetric and so on. Dan e.g. prefers that if there is one lamp on his desk, there must be one more opposite of the first to balance the desk. If things are in ‘balance’ Dan feels satisfied and can better focus on the task ahead of him.
• Intuition - Opposite of sensation is the people who goes for their intuition. When a person relay mostly on intuition he uses his unconscious to decide in all kinds of situations and environments. When Julie decorates her living room she might use two different designs of chairs and a third design for the couch. A person like Dan would have not liked if the furniture were not part of a matching set.

The Rational personality versus the Irrational .

The rational functions - How we make decisions or judge

• Thinking - When a person uses facts and reasoning to decide in situations they encounter. Often an engineer is in this category while an artist feels the situations and decides upon that. A person in this category asses the different outcomes and analyses the situation before deciding.
• Feeling - A person who relies on feelings uses his personal experience and goes with whatever feels right. This would typically be a creative person.

Irrational vs Rational personality If a person is dominantly irrational he likes to organize and create order in chaos. He sees the situations and quickly realizes where decisions must be made. Irrational people makes plans, schedules, lists and makes checks marks when tasks are done. This personality is the best at handling deadlines and are always done on time because they make good plans and stick to them. Situations with chaos and last-minute tasks are a stress factor and should be avoided. On the other hand, the rational personality loves to travel and experience lots of different environments. This personality trade feels stuck if things are too organized and can then feel the need to break free. The rational mind sees opportunities and explores the unknown. This personality always keeps his options open and has a hard time making decisions. They always want more knowledge so they can better adapt to any kind of environments that may occur in the future. Rules and deadlines are not popular with the rational personality and often tasks are not done until last-minute, if not after deadline.

Jung arranged his functions to be opposite. One person cannot function properly without having pairs of preferences from the rational and the irrational group. A person possesses both the ability to use sensing and intuition but will always prefer one over the other, i.e. one function will always dominate while the other is supporting. The same goes for thinking vs. feeling. It is important to note that the persona of a person possesses the dominant functions while the unconscious will dominantly possess the opposite functions, this is to balance the individual. See the examples below.

2 examples on a personality profile based on Jung's functional types.

By using the above described functions there are a total of 8 different possible combinations which a person can be. These 8 psychological types are formed from a person either being introvert or extravert and the persons dominant function. As Jung also pointed out it is important to remember that a whole personality does not consists of only two preferences, but also a third which is the conscious supporting function. Subconsciously the rest of the functions are also present. Jung’s 8 personality types can be seen in the figure below. Note that the featured letter is the shortened indicator, i.e. ET will e.g. be short for a Extrovert Thinking personality.

Jung’s 8 combinations of personality types. Inspired by .

Annotated bibliography

1. Winch, G. M. (2010), "Managing Construction projects". Second edition TEST BIB