As surely as the tides flow in and out, so do personality inventories and communication style assessments flow through organizations. From hiring to teambuilding to coaching and career development, advocates of personality assessments in general promise these tests can be used for a wealth of workplace applications, from hiring the right person for the right job in the first place to helping all those hires work together (because allegedly, at least, such assessments offer useful information for collaboration and communication).

It all sounds intriguing...until you start digging deeper. For starters, practitioners of the art of personality assessment can't really agree on how many personality "styles" or "types" are.