The type code had another unintended effect, which was to elevate the E-I and the J-P dichotomies to the same level as the functions. I had always thought of myself as an Introvert and nothing else. I had also been taught that I was a Judging type and I had been told that “J’s decide quickly,” but that was not true for me. So there were holes in my preference framework where my experience did not fit what I was taught.
Extraverted Feeling - Fe
… A wise employee will come to understand the culture of the company … and recognize that the team has long since developed a certain way of taking care of others. The team uses its auxiliary function, not yours, or the one your tertiary Child expects it to use. You cannot expect an organization to take care of you in the way that you want …
You can assert yourself … with an introverted function. You can take care of others … with an introverted function. You’re just not likely to do both these things with an introverted function, any more than one would do both with an extraverted function; our alternation of attitudes between the dominant and auxiliary takes care of that.
We can oppose this image of the San Francisco Giants to the kind of team we see in some corporations where the different members of the team try so hard to maintain the same corporate persona…On such a team, nobody shows any individual peculiarities …and I’m sure that no real consciousness can emerge from behind such a mask.
Organizational behavior, even more than individual, is shaped by myth and unconscious dynamics, rather than by rationality. I have noticed parallels between Jung’s observations of personality type and the gods who were at the centre of the classical Greeks’ understanding of motivation and behavior. The Greek pantheon can provide ways of talking about a wide range of value systems, energies, feeling states, behavior habits…
In the business world I have the privilege and challenge of leading a group of people where our typology is diverse. Sometimes, when we need each other most, we let each other down as the stress ignites the respective shadow functions within each of us. In the scenarios described herein, the ESTJs may have expected me, their ENFJ leader, to respond in crisis with warmth and sensitivity; but the stress of crisis became a game changer…