Communities, SNA & Personality Types

There has been a recent discussion on the Communities of Practice discussion list about personality typing and activities within communities.

Are specific personality types likely to perform specific roles within a community?

There has been some conjecture from proponents of DISC and Myers-Briggs as to which personality types might gravitate to which specific roles.

Another framework to use are Belbin's team roles. Rather than say: "Your presonality is structured in this way" (which Myers-Briggs definitely does and DISC does to a lesser extent), Belbin says: "These are the roles you find in a team - which ones are you most comfortable with?"

If you have a stable model for the roles in a community, then presumably you could create a set of questions that might identify the suitability of individuals for each of those roles.

As several people have pointed out, such personality profiling systems do not take account of the development of individuals - i.e. they tend to be static rather than dynamic.

In the course of this conversation, Valdis Krebs alluded to an informal study by an academic acquaintance that looked at correlations between Myers-Briggs types for students and SNA metrics (e.g. centrality) for their positions in their study-related networks. Interestingly, no correlation was found...