DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.9985769
title: The MBTI in Medical Education: a Powerful Strategy to Develop Teamwork

description: ABSTRACT Health care has become increasingly complex and new needs demand that people readjust their work processes towards the construction of multi-professional teams that assure users comprehensive, effective, high quality care. The Association of American Medical Colleges has recommended that medical curricula seek strategies for collaborative development, shared responsibility, and high-performance teams characterized by leadership, decision-making, communication, conflict resolution, self-knowledge, cooperativity, co-responsibility, and commitment. Accordingly, the National Curriculum Guidelines for Medical Undergraduate Courses states that the student must be able to take leadership in interpersonal relationships with commitment, responsibility, empathy, ability to make decisions, communication and perform effective actions, mediated by interaction, participation and dialogue, aiming at the community’s well-being. One strategy to produce teams and develop teamwork skills is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), widely used in the human resources, management and administration sectors in team building, with the purpose of self-knowledge and self-development, organizational development, managerial training, and academic and professional curriculum development. Thus, the MBTI was incorporated into the planning and execution of a Public Health discipline, in the seventh semester of a Medicine course of a Brazilian Federal University, as a strategy for the division of working teams during the academic period. The objective of the present article, therefore, is to report the experience and to perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis based on student answers obtained in questionnaires. Following application of the MBTI test, teams were formed according to the students’ temperament, with the sixteen psychological types divided into four large groups of temperaments: SJ (guardians), SP (craftsmen), NF (idealists), NT (rational). The teams were created so that they each had at least one representative of each temperament. The quantitative analysis shows that the intervention was statistically significant. Qualitative analysis of the answers to the open-ended questions was obtained initially by categorization of the information, followed by grouping into broad categories, through content analysis. The categories “satisfactory team formation”, “opportunity for self-knowledge and peer knowledge by the MBTI”, and “disagreement with the MBTI division” elucidated the students’ perceptions about the potentialities and challenges of using the MBTI for team division in medical training. The experience taught us that adding individual skills is possible and important, not only for the construction of quality end products, but for the work process to be valued, allowing self-knowledge and the development of interpersonal skills. It is evident that we, as students and teachers, health professionals and people, should allow ourselves to be affected by the transformative potential of the educational process in order to enable us to act as agents that promote change.