Abstract
M.A.
The purpose of Personal and Professional Leadership (PPL) facilitating is to bring about intrapersonal, interpersonal and professional change and development in trainees. In order to ensure that these changes occur, trainees should be addressed on emotional as well as rational level -whether by means of PPL counselling and I or a PPL course. Personal and Professional Leadership development therefore focuses on constant growth and change. Growth is a prerequisite for change, which in turn necessitates learning. A common problem that hinders change and growth is that participants in a training group normally hail from heterogeneous backgrounds. This implies different personality traits, values, perceptions and belief systems, which influence directly how a person learns and processes information during a course. Consequently, the need exists to gain insight into the personality types and learning styles of groups in order to make adjustments in the activities of the course package.
The preliminary literature study revealed that insightful similarities exist between different temperament, learning and personality styles on the one hand and brain dominance on the other hand. The need arose to research a suitable instrument within the PPL field with a rich interpretation, being simple, quick to complete and easy to interpret. The preliminary literature study confirmed that this could be achieved by using the Neethling Brain Instrument (NBI) as a brain dominance assessment instrument.
The following research question was asked:
Should brain dominance be used as an assessment instrument, would an enriched
interpretation be possible by means of investigating temperament, learning and
personality styles?
The central objective of the research is to investigate the potential link between brain dominance and temperament, learning and personality styles, in order to facilitate the compilation of a personal portrayal profile of the group through interpretation from literature. This personal portrayal profile will give the facilitator insight into the different learning, personality and thinking styles of the group that will ensure a better
understanding of the training group before training commences. This insight will help the facilitator to initiate change and growth.
The research design for this study may be regarded as an exploratory and descriptive literature research study. The phenomenological method of research was applied. By means of logical deduction (i.e. logical arguing about the acceptability of certain essential characteristics), the different temperament, learning and personality styles were evaluated (inter-subjective evaluation) for the applicability on brain dominance, in order to draft the personal portrayal profile.