Dwight Schrute personality type: ESTJ

Dwight Schrute once set a fire in the office to test everyone’s emergency preparedness. Nobody passed. People climbed through the ceiling, Angela threw her cat into the drop ceiling, and Stanley had a heart attack. Dwight treated it as useful data.

That tells you more about his fear than his fun. He is a 6 with a 5 wing, and a counterphobic one. Sixes are built around one question: what could go wrong, and who can I trust when it does? Most Sixes worry quietly. Counterphobic Sixes charge straight at the danger.

Dwight is a volunteer sheriff’s deputy, a martial arts devotee and a man who treats every visitor as a possible threat. His loyalty to Michael is almost religious, but it is a soldier’s loyalty, which means it wobbles when a stronger authority appears. In The Coup he goes behind Michael’s back to Jan, gets caught, and ends up begging for forgiveness.

Type-wise, I call him an ESTJ. Extraverted thinking wants a chain of command, clear rules and measurable results. He loves titles, he loves sales numbers, and he is very good at selling paper. Introverted sensing ties him to tradition. The Schrute family farm runs on customs that seem to come from another century, and Dwight defends every one of them with a straight face.

Life gets messy where feeling and intuition live. His intuition comes out as wild schemes and conspiracy theories. His feeling side is where Angela lives. Dwight cannot say what he feels, so his love turns into a duel with Andy in a parking lot, a written agreement about a baby, and years of secret meetings in the warehouse.

Security eventually comes from people instead of rules. He finally becomes regional manager, gives Jim the title of assistant to the regional manager, and marries Angela on the beet farm with Jim as his bestest mensch. The paranoid salesman ends up with a family and a best friend he spent nine years pranking back.

A lot of fans type him ISTJ, pointing to his rigid routines and his love of rules. Fair. Still, Dwight wants to run the room, address the troops and win the argument out loud. He draws energy from command, and that is extraverted thinking leading the way.