Does Your Team Like You, Respect You, or Admire You?

What’s Coming Up

• Key Takeaways
• What Does Your Team Really Feel About You?
• Why Do Liking, Respecting, and Admiring Diverge by Personality Type?
• Which Personality Types Admire Their Bosses?
• Why Thinking and Feeling Types Express Regard Differently
• How to Read Your Team’s Signals
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Further Reading

What Does Your Team Really Feel About You?

Most leaders treat respect from their team as the foundation of everything else. It shapes whether team members follow your direction, trust your judgment, and ultimately perform to your expectations.

But respect is not the whole picture.

Alongside respect, there are two other things your team might feel about you – and they don’t always travel together. Whether you want to admit it or not, you probably hope the people on your team like you, too. And if they admire you, even better.

Some employees offer all three. For others, respect is all you can hope for.

Over 7,700 people across all personality types participated in our “Bosses” survey, answering questions about how they relate to the leaders they report to – including how much they admire, like, and respect them. The results revealed that these sentiments don’t always show up together. And how they show up is shaped, in large part, by personality type.

We asked respondents three separate questions – whether they like their boss, whether they respect their boss, and whether they admire their boss. Following those questions through the data reveals a steady escalation in how sharply personality divides the responses, ending with the widest gap of the three.

Why Do Liking, Respecting, and Admiring Diverge by Personality Type?

For Feeling types, the three sentiments tend to develop together. For Thinking types, they are often three very different feelings – and asking about each as a separate question is the only way to see it.

Two types make the contrast especially clear. ENFJ personalities (Protagonists) extend liking, respecting, and admiring at similar rates. Their three responses fall within an 8-point band. INTP personalities (Logicians) show something very different – a 29-point spread across the same three questions.

The data tells the story one question at a time.

Do You Like Your Current Boss?

This is the most personal of the three questions we asked. It doesn’t refer to their team leader’s performance or track record – it asks whether the relationship itself feels good.

Feeling types tend to say yes, they do like their boss. ESFJ personalities (Consuls) lead at 74%, ISFJ personalities (Defenders) follow at 69%, and ENFJs come in at 68%. Building warmth into workplace relationships is something these personality types invest in – and the responses suggest that investment shapes how they see the people they report to.

For Thinking types, the picture shifts. Only 43% of INTPs say they like their current boss – not a number that signals dysfunction, but notably lower than where they land on the respect question.

Do You Respect Your Current Boss?

Respect is more functional – it’s more about judgment and execution than personal warmth. Does this person make good decisions? Can you trust their calls?

Once again, Feeling types lead on respecting their boss, with ESFJs topping the chart at 84%, with ENFJs at 76%. For these types, respect rides slightly higher than liking but stays in the same neighborhood – another point in a tight cluster.

Thinking types also report respecting their boss. While it may be the lowest agreement of all personality types, more than half (57%) of INTPs do still report respecting their current boss. This makes them one of the least likely types to extend warmer forms of regard, but it by no means implies it never happens. Of the three sentiments, respect is the most rational and competency-based, which may explain why it remains relatively common among Thinking types even when the others do not.

Where the Gap Widens

That 14-point gap between liking (43%) and respecting (57%) for INTPs is the first clear sign that these feelings are two very different sentiments. For ENFJs, the same gap is only 8 points – liking at 68%, respecting at 76%.

But these are just the first two of three sentiments. On admiration, the gap becomes the widest of the three by a clear margin.

Which Personality Types Admire Their Bosses?

When we asked respondents “Do you usually admire your bosses?” the responses split sharply along the Thinking and Feeling personality trait spectrum once again.

ENFJs led the dataset, with 69% saying they do admire their bosses. ESFJs came in close behind at 68%, followed by ESTJ personalities (Executives) at 64% and ENFP personalities (Campaigners) at 60%.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 28% of INTPs said they usually admire their bosses. INTJ personalities (Architects) came in at 31%, and ENTP personalities (Debaters) at 34%.

That’s a 41-point difference between ENFJs and INTPs on a single question.

For ENFJs, admiration at 69% sits almost exactly alongside liking (68%) and just below respecting (76%). All three show up together to form a general sense of what they think about their boss.

For INTPs, the story is different. Respect at 57% is the high point. Liking drops to 43%. Admiration falls to 28% – less than half what ENFJs report on the same question.

The types with the highest admiration rates are predominantly Feeling personality types – people who naturally factor relationship warmth and personal connection into how they evaluate the people around them. For them, admiration tends to be a natural byproduct of a good working relationship.

Thinking types – especially Introverted ones – approach this differently, and from a more pragmatic perspective. Their admiration is given only if they think their boss is fully competent in their domain. “Admiration” carries an extra charge – it implies elevation, something worth emulating, not just acknowledging. For types who are precise in their evaluations, that bar sits higher.

This doesn’t mean Thinking types are withholding their good opinion of their boss. It simply means that admiring a boss is not a neutral concept for them. Their admiration is reserved.

Why Different Personality Types Express Regard Differently

For Feeling personality types, the big-picture of their relationship with their boss is part of how they evaluate that person and feel about them. They factor in how a boss treats them day to day, what it feels like to work under that leadership, and whether there’s genuine warmth in the dynamic.

Those relational signals color how they interpret everything else – including whether they consider their boss to be competent. This is why admiration, liking, and respect tend to cluster together for them. When a working relationship is going reasonably well, an Extraverted Feeling type like an ENFJ can extend the full package of appreciation – not because the leader is exceptional, but because that’s just how they shape their opinions inside a generally positive relationship.

For Analyst types and other Thinking personalities, functional respect is the primary register. This often results in a more precise evaluation than the bundled regard Feeling types extend more readily. The INTP who respects your technical judgment but doesn’t particularly like you, who has never thought of you as someone worth admiring, and who won’t remember your birthday might still be one of your most committed contributors. Their commitment just looks different from what team culture tends to expect.

For leaders managing personality types on the Feeling end of the spectrum, the bundling has a practical implication. The emotional signals you receive from these team members tend to move together. A warm, positive relationship probably means you’re getting all three at once. A strained one likely means you’re getting less of each – simultaneously.

How to Read Your Team’s Signals

The takeaway from all this data isn’t to lower your standards for some personality types and raise them for others in an effort to earn everyone’s admiration equally. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. We hope this data helps you recalibrate how you interpret their signals, and understand that you don’t have to have the full package of appreciation from every member of your team to lead them successfully.

The team member who admires you and the team member who quietly respects your judgment may both be telling you the working relationship is going well. They’re just expressing it in different ways.

Further Reading

• What Does Your Team Really Think About You as Their Boss?
• Your Mood Is Your Team’s Problem: Leading with Emotional Awareness
• Why Do Some Employees Avoid Their Boss? Personality Type Explains More Than You Think
• How Boss Feedback Affects Each Personality Type
• What Personality Reveals About Pushback from Your Team