Personality @ Work

Why we don't use Myers-Briggs or DISC

Our team is incorporating personality and attitude into our Accountability Chart and 360-view assessment system. Our goal is to provide more assessment information (other than work performance), enabling better coaching and evaluating whether we put the right people in the right seats.

We decided to use the Big 5 Personality Traits, or OCEAN, instead of the popular MBTI or DISC.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

• more popular by the layman, lack of scientific backing, can be ASSESSED, not tested

• classify individual personality into 16 fixed and rigid categories of personality TYPE

Big 5 Personality (OCEAN)

• more mainstream adopted by psychologists, can be TESTED

• recognize the spectrum of distinctive TRAITS and sub-traits, there is no fixed stereotype, and it changes over time

• not all personalities are positive (desirable) to the same end of the spectrum, e.g. neuroticism

[image credit: Bing Image Creator]

Big 5 Personality Traits: OCEAN or CANOE

There are 5 big personalities, which can be further broken down into more sub-traits or aspects. Different psychologists have varying terminology.

• Openness (to experience)

• Conscientiousness

• Extraversion

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism (emotional stability)

There are no good or bad traits; it is just who we are at the current moment. With awareness, one can adopt a different style in different situations, and this is the main objective of V-Work, which would like to bring awareness to our team. The power is that we can intentionally be more assertive (less agreeable) or more agreeable (more collaborative) in another scenario.

Applications of Personality Traits at Work

In the context of work, we can use the personality traits to:

• assembling a team with balanced traits

• awareness of the team member’s traits

• include personality trait questions during the recruitment interviews, especially about the conscientiousness trait

Out of the 5 personality traits, conscientiousness is the best predictor of job performance for low-to-moderate-complexity non-creative jobs.

According to a recent research article titled “Big Five personality traits in the workplace: Investigating personality differences between employees, supervisors, managers, and entrepreneurs.” in 2023, there are some significant personality traits when comparing the roles. Of course, the details vary by individual and more specific roles, such as salesperson, designer, etc. Here is a rough overview of the study that shows some ‘relative’ changes in the average score by traits for the focus group. Hence, similar variation (meaning not the same average by job role) will likely occur in every organization.

In general, there are two ends of the spectrum that we should pay more attention to:

(1) Low conscientiousness

(2) High neuroticism

We can better manage team dynamics by knowing the team members’ personality traits.