Picture a talent review discussion. A name comes up, and someone says, “She is very analytical, so she will reflect on feedback.” Or, “He is so confident, he will thrive on a stretch assignment.” Or “She is reserved. I am not sure she wants it.”
As a learning and development leader, you may have taken part in discussions like these, whether giving such feedback or receiving it. Each comment treats a person’s personality style as a sign of how willing they are to learn and grow. We decided to test whether that holds true.
How we tested it
Growth mindset, a term coined by psychologist Carol Dweck, is in simple terms the belief that abilities can be developed through effort, good strategies and input from others. It shows up as seeking feedback, taking on challenges and learning from setbacks. A fixed mindset is largely the opposite.
We invited a random selection of more than 10,000 people to take a growth mindset questionnaire, the Mindset Assessment Profile, or MAP. All had already completed a personality assessment, the Personality Diversity Indicator, or PDI, which identifies a person’s predominant style among four.
Between September 2025 and October 2026, 166 individuals took part in the MAP questionnaire of their own motivation.
The MAP has 18 questions, is self-reported and places a person’s beliefs on a 100-point scale from strongly fixed to strongly growth. Developed over 10 years, it shows good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha of .83). Other researchers have shown that short self-report scales can measure growth mindset reliably.
What we found
If personality shapes mindset, people with one style would have scored higher than those with another.
They did not. The average score for each of the four styles fell between 79.7 and 83.5 out of 100 points, all within the same band of the scale. Differences that small could easily arise by chance, so they are not statistically significant.
Personality style ultimately accounted for 1.5 percent of the differences in scores between people. The other 98 percent came from elsewhere. Every style had a wide spread, from people scoring below 69 to people scoring above 86. Knowing someone’s personality style told us almost nothing about where they would sit on the MAP scale.
All but three participants scored in the growth mindset range. One style was represented by only 18 people. The results show an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship. Even so, three statistical tests pointed to the same conclusion.
For learning and development leaders, we see three takeaways from this study.
1. Development is for the whole workforce. If personality tells us little about mindset, there is no case for favoring one personality style over others in development decisions. In practice, nominations often go to the most visible people, those who are articulate, confident and quick to speak up. Those are communication preferences, and they are easy to mistake for a growth mindset.
A person with a strong growth mindset but a more reserved manner can easily be overlooked.
Criteria based on observed and cross-referenced behavior appear to be the better and more balanced way forward. For example, we can ask how someone responded to developmental feedback, what challenges they took on and what they changed after a setback.
2. Build the culture, not only the program. Our study did not measure working environments, but other research offers insight on this. In a study of more than 12,000 U.S. ninth graders, a short growth mindset intervention raised grades among lower-achieving students, and the gains appeared where peer norms supported its message. Canning et al. found that employees who saw their company as endorsing a growth mindset described its culture as more collaborative, innovative and ethical, and reported more trust and commitment.
Neither study looked at leadership development at work, but both suggest the environment influences whether a growth mindset turns into behavior. When someone returns from a good development program to a team where mistakes are still punished, new habits and beliefs can fade quickly.
So, when planning development or training, it helps to ask not only: Who should we develop? But also: What kind of culture will they go back to?
The conditions that matter include psychological safety, structured feedback, stretch assignments, coaching and senior leaders who learn in front of an audience. A senior leader who says, “I got that wrong, and here is what I learned,” may be the best development content available.
3. Use personality tools where they add the most value. Personality tools do something valuable. They give people a shared preferred language to communicate, make decisions and respond under pressure. In our experience, that shared understanding makes teams more patient and better at working through disagreement. Our findings are consistent with that purpose.
Problems arise only when a personality style is treated as a forecast of someone’s potential, which such tools were never designed to provide. It helps to state in writing that personality insights are for communication, teamwork and self-awareness, and that they stay out of nomination, succession and promotion decisions. That protects the people being assessed, and the integrity of the tools.
The capacity to grow talent
While you are preparing for your next talent review, consider these three questions:
- When we last described someone as high potential, what had we seen them do to earn that label or status?
- Does one personality style dominate our programs and succession lists while our workforce is more mixed?
- What happens after someone admits a mistake?
Our aim for the study was to find out whether any of the four PDI personality styles has a stronger tendency toward a growth mindset. On this evidence, none does, and we find that encouraging. The capacity to grow may already be present across the people you have, whatever their personality style.
The opportunity for L&D leaders is to build the culture that brings it out.
This research was not commissioned or funded by a third party. The assessments used were developed by the authors’ firms. This article is an abridged version of a full white paper, available for download here.
