Hypothesis 1: Individuals of the same educational background work better together than with diverse educational backgrounds.
To address the hypothesis, it is necessary to define the key elements of the correlation. More specifically, it is needed to conceptualise “better working together.” The notion may encompass a variety of things, including general friendliness in the workplace and a low number of conflicts. It is possible to come up with a wide range of criteria for assessing whether people in a certain group work better together than people in a different group. For example, a company’s financial performance or pace of development can be regarded as such criteria. To examine the given hypothesis, “better working together” will be defined as a high level of innovation in a group, its ability for efficient cooperation, and overall growth of group members’ enterprise.
Innovations move businesses and industries forward. However, innovations require favourable environments, and much academic effort was put into revealing the necessary components of such environments. The econometric analysis determined educational background diversity as a factor that effectively facilitates innovation (Østergaard, Timmermans, & Kristinsson, 2011). When people with different knowledge, skills, and abilities contribute to the common problem-solving and decision-making, challenges are addressed with higher efficiency and creativity.
In the modern world, where virtually all the spheres of human activities are highly interconnected, diversity becomes a strong tool for effective operation in the market and society. Therefore, groups of individuals with diverse educational backgrounds are more likely to succeed when working together on the same projects. However, their cooperation may be complicated by the lack of common background, but this factor was not found, in general, to outweigh the advantages of diversity (Banks, 2015). The hypothesis is thus disconfirmed: individuals of the same educational background do not work better together than those with diverse educational backgrounds.
Hypothesis 2: Individuals are born with personality types which do not change under any circumstances.
Typology is a part of psychology that seeks dividing all the people into certain categories based on certain criteria. Typology can be a convenient tool for managing interactions between people because, instead of describing individual characteristics of each person, it generalises characteristics. It creates a framework where all the people identified to be of the same type can be treated or addressed similarly, which is easier than developing individual approaches.
However, creating valid and reliable typology is difficult because it is acknowledged in psychology today that any categorisation is an approximation that fails to divide people into separate groups. Despite the acknowledgement, various attempts were made to develop effective typologies. One of the prominent ones is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The indicator is based on Jungian typology, where the criteria are inclinations towards extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judgment or perception (Henkel, Marion, & Bourdeau, 2015).
The personality types described by Jung were identified by inborn characteristics, which means that one cannot change his or her type over the years. However, as it was pointed out at the beginning, a strict classification of individuals is hard to achieve. Today, for example, the MBTI results may show that a person is 32 per cent introvert and 68 per cent introvert. Therefore, there is no dichotomy but graduality. Besides, tools of identifying types, such as written psychological tests, are heavily criticised for being unreliable and producing different results for the same people even with short intervals between testing sessions (Lloyd, 2012). Besides, many psychologists doubt that inborn types exist at all because the environment can have crucial effects on individual development. Therefore, the hypothesis is disconfirmed: individuals are not born with personality types that do not change under any circumstances.
References
Banks, J. A. (2015). Cultural diversity and education. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge.
Henkel, T., Marion, J., & Bourdeau, D. (2015). Researching MBTI personality types: Project management master’s degree students. Journal of Human Resources & Adult Learning, 11(1), 14-23.
Lloyd, J. B. (2012). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and mainstream psychology: Analysis and evaluation of an unresolved hostility. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 33(1), 23-34.
Østergaard, C. R., Timmermans, B., & Kristinsson, K. (2011). Does a different view create something new? The effect of employee diversity on innovation. Research Policy, 40(3), 500-509.