Are your corporate personality tests just expensive astrology?

I'm often referred to by my nickname Abby Normal.

Are your corporate personality tests just expensive astrology?

Quartz Media

For more than 100 years, organizations from the U.S. Army to Big Tech have turned to personality tests to unlock the mysteries of human behavior. This niche of the organizational-management industry now generates $2 billion annually, with some 80% of Fortune 500 companies using personality tests in the hiring process or as assessment tools for existing employees.

Whether it’s Myers-Briggs, CliftonStrengths, Enneagram, or some even more recent development, millions of employees find themselves quizzed each year: Just who do you think you are, how do you fit in here?

At the same time, actual psychologists have spent decades amassing evidence that most of these tests lack scientific validity. In other words, the tests don’t measure what they claim to measure — even as the corporate appetite for them remains voracious.

So what gives?

Astrology in a button-down

The persistence of workplace personality tests may be best explained by the Forer Effect — also known as the Barnum effect — named following years of experiments that established how seemingly positive feedback, no matter how impersonal, may be accepted as accurate.

For instance, in the late 1940s, psychologist Bertram Forer handed out what looked like individualized feedback after a personality test. Forer’s feedback included lines such as:

“Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.”

“At times you are extroverted and sociable, while at other times you are reserved.”

“At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.”

“You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.”

Asked to assess their feedback, respondents overwhelmingly answered that it was an accurate evaluation of their personalities, and that the generic “results” captured them almost perfectly. As it turns out, such statements are just the sort of vague-but-not-unflattering descriptions anyone could agree with.

Psychologists recognize that the same dynamic is inherent to the appeal of horoscopesl: They make us feel seen, create a sense of belonging, and offer simple narratives for complex realities. For managers and HR staff, personality tests can offer the same appearance and promise of clarity, attempting to explain such a complex phenomenon as individual human motivation, which otherwise resists easy answers — and sometimes resists answers at all.

From the literal trenches to the corporate trenches

The first large-scale personality-test experiments date back to World War I, when the U.S. Army developed assessments in an effort to predict which recruits might suffer from “shell shock,” an early term for what we now recognize as PTSD. After the war, American companies adopted similar tests in a bid to identify troublesome personalities and, often, to guide hiring. By the 1930s, personality testing was an accepted part of corporate life, just as IQ tests were a familiar feature in schools.

Even as counterevidence emerged, the appeal proved hard to resist. By the 1980s, Myers-Briggs workshops were ubiquitous, pushed by HR departments eager for teambuilding tools. This brings us to today, when personality testing is a professionalized industry with glossy marketing and AI components.

Myers-Briggs remains popular, an enduring classic despite widespread criticism and the fact that your “type” may change from one sitting to the next. Another popular option is DISC: a multiple-choice staple that sorts employees into four neat buckets.

The CliftonStrengths (formerly known as the StrengthsFinder) is Gallup’s aggressively marketed model, ranking 34 “talent themes,” and boasting of almost 30 million respondents worldwide. The Enneagram, a quasi-spiritual import now repackaged for corporate retreats, purports to identify nine personality types. With a feel both ancient and modern, you can take it whether you’re in a bog-standard corporate meeting or a troubled marriage. The Big Five is an assessment with a greater claim to scientific credibility, measuring traits including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Newer entrants include 16 Personalities (a modern MBTI spin with slick UX), various takes on Les McKeown’s The Synergist, and AI tools promising customized insights. Some vendors charge as much as $100 per employee for basic reports. Enterprise packages can run into the tens of thousands.

While methods and marketing vary, the central promise is usually the same: decoding workplace behavior.

What employees really think

Soliciting opinions from rank-and-file workers across the spectrum, Quartz found that reactions range from the amused to the exasperated.

One senior university administrator described the tests as “the second circle of corporate hell” — a surefire way to waste an hour and reduce people to boxes. He recalled taking the Color Wheel, StrengthsFinder, Predictive Index, and many others. “I don’t know that I’ve taken anything from them other than a newfound disappointment in colleagues who seem to actually buy into them,” he said.

Another employee, a mid-level staffer at a Fortune 500 firm, said the DISC assessment felt like “it was desperately trying to categorize you into its neatly arranged character compartments. Each question seemed expressly written to push you off the fence of being a willing and adaptable employee and into the bucket of some extreme unfiltered persona type. The team meeting that brought together everyone’s results was mostly just a gossipy session of comparing notes that could have been mistaken for a chat about each person’s star sign.”

Others were more charitable. A librarian described her library’s “True Colors” test as “silly and fun and painless,” giving colleagues a chance to laugh together — even though the results never came up again.

The surprising upside

Such responses may, however indirectly, point to the positive strength of such tests. Viewed in the best light, they can function as engaging icebreakers, give employees something in common to discuss, and create actual pretexts for self-revelation.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to understand why they appeal to HR departments. They offer a seemingly objective pretext to obtain something management really wants: insight into what motivates employees, a chance to provide structured feedback, and a tidy framework for discussing differences. In other words a sense of progress when it comes to understanding one’s team.

Employees generally want these things, too, of course. It’s why they nod along even when the categories themselves appear flimsy. In that sense, the real product isn’t accuracy. It’s affirmation and connection, and that itself is the useful thing.

Making the most of the tests

It’s tempting to dismiss personality testing altogether, but presented more as icebreakers and exercises than diagnostics, they can be a harmless and even fun way to start conversations.

Perhaps the most important thing managers can do is be honest about their limits. Such tools aren’t 100% accurate, while pretending otherwise could erode trust. Fostering an atmosphere of relative intellectual honesty is more likely to lead to truly productive and revealing conversations — building trust and camaraderie against the odds.

For instance, you might openly acknowledge that these tests have elements of bonding exercises. Leading with such an acknowledgement helps communicate the stakes and helps employees understand what your goals are in administering and delivering test tsiresults. You might also avoid overinvestment. A lighter touch can prevent the frustration many employees feel when too much weight is placed on Myers-Briggs or any other test du jour.

Managers can also model curiosity by inviting employees to discuss not just what resonates but what doesn’t. That simple reframe communicates that the test isn’t an absolute truth, but a jumping-off point.

The bigger leadership lesson? It’s less about tests themselves and more about what their popularity signals: a hunger for feedback, belonging, and clarity at work.

Meet those needs and your workplace won’t require astrology, expensive or otherwise.

—Catherine Baab