Personality

Personality encompasses the relatively stable feelings, thoughts, and behavioral patterns a person has. Our personalities differentiate us from other people, and understanding someone’s personality gives us clues about how that person is likely to act and feel in a variety of situations.

Personality Traits

Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions (e.g., extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness), and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on any given trait.

An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions rather than distinct personality types. This means that when we talk about introverts and extraverts, we are not really talking about two distinct types of people who are completely and qualitatively different from one another. Instead, we are talking about people who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution. In fact, when personality psychologists measure traits like extraversion, they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels.

Traits describe stable patterns of behavior that persist for long periods of time (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). Importantly, these stable patterns can have broad-ranging consequences for many areas of our life (Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). For instance, think about the factors that determine success in college. If you were asked to guess what factors predict good grades, you might guess something like intelligence. This guess would be correct, but we know much more about who is likely to do well. Specifically, personality researchers have also found the personality traits like conscientiousness play an important role in college and beyond, probably because highly conscientious individuals study hard, get their work done on time, and are less distracted by nonessential activities that take time away from school work. In addition, highly conscientious people are often healthier than people low in conscientiousness because they are more likely to maintain healthy diets, to exercise, and to follow basic safety procedures like wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets. Over the long term, this consistent pattern of behaviors can add up to meaningful differences in health and longevity. Thus, personality traits are not just a useful way to describe people; they help predict how good a worker someone will be, how long he or she will live, and the types of jobs and activities the person will enjoy.

Stability of Personality Traits

If personality is stable, does this mean that it does not change? You probably remember how you have changed and evolved as a result of your own life experiences, attention you received in early childhood, the style of parenting you were exposed to, successes and failures you had in high school, and other life events. In fact, our personality changes over long periods of time. For example, we tend to become more socially dominant, more conscientious (organized and dependable), and more emotionally stable between the ages of 20 and 40, whereas openness to new experiences may begin to decline during this same time (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). In other words, even though we treat personality as relatively stable, changes occur. Moreover, even in childhood, our personality shapes who we are and has lasting consequences for us. For example, studies show that part of our career success and job satisfaction later in life can be explained by our childhood personality (Judge & Higgins, 1999; Staw, Bell, & Clausen, 1986).

The Five-Factor Model of Personality

Trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is called The Big Five, or the Five-Factor Model (Video 1) (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1987).

The Big Five comprises five major traits (Figure 1): openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Click on each trait below to learn more, particularly as each relates to the workplace.

Scores on the Big Five traits are mostly independent. That means that a person’s standing on one trait tells very little about their standing on the other traits of the Big Five. For example, a person can be extremely high in extraversion and be either high or low on neuroticism. Similarly, a person can be low in agreeableness and be either high or low in conscientiousness. Thus, in the Five-Factor Model, you need five scores to describe most of an individual’s personality. Figure 2 provides characteristics of people who would score high and low on each of these traits.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Aside from the Big Five personality traits, perhaps the most well-known and most often used personality assessment is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI was developed in 1943 by a mother–daughter team, Isabel Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs. Its objective at the time was to aid World War II veterans in identifying the occupation that would suit their personalities. Since that time, MBTI has become immensely popular, with some 2 million people taking the test annually.

The MBTI relies on the psychological theories of Carl Jung and works on the basic assumption that individuals fall into fairly distinct classes, or types, of personalities. In MBTI, people are grouped using four dimensions. Based on how a person is classified on these four dimensions, it is possible to talk about 16 unique personality types, such as ESTJ and ISTP (Table 1).

A person’s classifications within each of these four categories are then combined to create 16 unique personality types identified by the MBTI. Four-letter acronyms are used to name these personality types, with the letters representing the corresponding trait within each category. For example, a person who exhibits characteristics of extraversion, intuition, thinking, and judging would be classified as ENTJ.

While the MBTI has been popular for decades, its use has been heavily criticized (Video 2). In particular, critics of the MBTI point to data that shows that as much as 50 percent of an individual’s MBTI classification will change from test to test with as little as only four or five weeks between tests (Pittenger 1993). Another potential weakness of the tool is that it divides individuals into distinct classes for each category, not indicating how strong an individual’s preference is toward that end of the spectrum. For instance, if an individual is slightly more introverted than extraverted, he or she receives the same classification as someone who is intensely introverted. The distinction between two such individuals is not represented.

Proponents of the MBTI caution against its use for the purposes of hiring or promoting employees, and suggest that the MBTI is intended as a learning tool. Notably, administration of the MBTI is strictly controlled by the Myers-Briggs Company and requires costly certification to administer.^[1] The Myers-Briggs Company and certified administrators have strong incentives to defend it.

Beyond Personality Traits

Is our behavior in organizations dependent on our personality traits? To some extent, yes, and to some extent, no. For example, having a sociable and outgoing personality may encourage people to seek friends and prefer social situations. This does not mean that their personality will immediately affect their work behavior. At work, we have jobs to do and roles to perform. Therefore, our behavior may be more strongly affected by what is expected of us, as opposed to how we want to behave. When people have a lot of freedom at work, their personality will become a stronger influence over their behavior (Barrick & Mount, 1993).

Free Traits and Personal Projects

According to Brian Little, a prominent personality psychologist, our traits are by no means fixed. Little suggests that we are often able to override our biological make-up through the adoption of what he refers to as free traits, which allow us to act in different ways to our natural selves. We call on these free traits to meet the demands of different situations and achieve projects and goals that are important to us.

Little recommends that we think of ourselves as amateur scientists who are continually exploring and testing the world around us to discover what works and what doesn’t. We do and say things, and then we observe the reactions to these things and unconsciously store the results. We apply what we learn from our experiments to the advancement of what Little describes as our personal projects, or the goals and pursuits that underlie people’s behavior.

The personal projects in question might be big (such as career ambitions) or small (like cleaning one’s desk), but they form the bedrock of our day-to-day behavior and our relationships with our families, friends, and coworkers. Sometimes our personal project pursuit requires us to act out of character by engaging free traits; other times, we can just be ourselves. Little proposes that the successful pursuit of core projects that are meaningful, manageable, supported by others, and generate positive feelings can greatly impact our happiness and the quality of our lives.

Brian Little’s personal project framework has important implications for organizational life. In an ideal world, jobs would perfectly align with people’s enduring traits, but that’s very rarely the case. When employees engage in free-trait behavior—stretching beyond their usual preferences to pursue important goals—it can strain well-being and physical health. Over time, those costs may result in lower productivity, weaker performance, and more time away from work. Organizations should therefore treat free-trait enactment and personal projects as key forces shaping behavior, and design work accordingly. For instance, organizations might offer employees opportunities to recover, such as by providing quiet spaces to decompress and regain energy after demanding, out-of-character efforts.

Learn more about Brian Little’s personal projects framework by reading the following article.

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​Chapter Attributions

This chapter incorporates material from the following sources:

• https://nobaproject.com/modules/personality-traits#content
• https://nobaproject.com/modules/personality-stability-and-change
• https://openwa.pressbooks.pub/industrialorganizationalpsychology/chapter/3-3-individual-differences-values-and-personality/
• https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-mcc-supervision/chapter/personal-values-and-personality-at-work
• https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/acting-out-of-character-in-the-workplace