Psychological types in Australian Natural Resource Management:

Welcome subscribers. Here is our first contribution to our new blog.

It has been prepared by Helen Allison, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Murdoch University and a researcher into complex systems.

Along with Richard Hobbs Helen has written a fine work, Science and Policy in Natural Resource Management (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and she is also a MBTI® Practitioner and a global traveller.

Feel free to comment on Helen’s abstract in the facility available on this blog.

Psychological types in Australian Natural Resource Management: one reason why systemic approaches are not adopted?

Helen E. Allison and Richard J. Hobbs

School of Environmental Science, Murdoch University, 90 South St, Murdoch, Western Australia 6150, Australia

Abstract

In the past two decades natural resource management across rural Australia has increasingly come under the influence of regional groups, such as Catchment Management Authorities, as well as direct government intervention (regulation) and the normal impact of the market.

We hypothesise that the psychological composition of such groups and other decision-makers may have a significant effect on their decision-making, and that membership of management groups may preferentially select for certain psychological types that affect their capacity to respond to complex decisions in a rapidly changing world.
This paper uses the well-established Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) to assess the distribution of personality types, and found that there was a marked preponderance of both males and females in the ISTJ, ESTJ and ENTJ categories, and that the overall composition of the groups sampled was strongly weighted to sensate (S), thinking (T) and judgmental (J) preferences with no significant difference between the proportional distribution of types among males and females.
The distribution of preference types was markedly different from that of the large base population used for comparison. The results are consistent with earlier studies that found a high proportion of introversion (I), thinking (T) and judging (J) among both Australian farmers and those in senior management positions.
We postulate that a wider range of both preference and personality types within the composition of NRM decision-making groups would increase their flexibility and adaptability in responding to the rapidly changing complex problems they must deal with.