ABSTRACT

The concept of extraversion is more than 100 years old, having been introduced by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung in 1910. The German-born British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, established that the degree to which a person exhibited extraversion was hard-wired into the brain. Both Eysenck and the US mother-and-daughter team, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers, developed instruments for measuring extraversion by questionnaire; that of the latter being the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Both of the two US initiated pooled studies14,15 reported a moderate connection between extraversion and managerial performance. The UK small and medium sized enterprises (SME )director study12 did not find a significant relationship with overall effectiveness ratings but was able to establish a moderate link with job size, a finding which echoes the extremely high level of extraversion displayed by the CEOs at the pinnacle of the global management hierarchy.