Personality in the Workplace and the Usefulness of Personality Theories

PERSONALITY THEORIES IN THE WORKPLACE
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I. Introduction
Researchers and practitioners have become more interested in examining the role of personality in the workplace. The growth in interest can be attributed to the prevalent influence of personality on one’s behavior within the workplace. Organizations that understand the personalities of their workforce are in a unique position to make informed decisions on organizational processes such as hiring, development, and training of employees. Individual personality also has a significant influence on workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction, communication, and team dynamics. An informed understanding of the employee's personality enables the employee to create a workplace environment that maximizes the productivity of employees in the workplace. This essay will discuss the rising interest in personality in the workplace and evaluate the usefulness of personality theories to formal organizations.
II. Background Information on Personality
Everyone is a unique person with a personal set of thoughts, experiences, and feelings that can be reliably used to describe, explain, and predict human behavior. The interest in the study of human attributes can be traced back to 350 B.C.E. with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics attempts to map the traits that define a person. In the 19th Century, Francis Galton inspired the research into personality research with his introduction of lexical hypothesis theory. In the 20th Century, psychologists focused on discussing individual differences and individual traits. Notably, there are many definitions of personality. However, the most dominant definition is the view that personality is “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” (American Psychological Association n.d., p. 1). The individual’s personality is influenced by factors such as environment, culture, life experiences, and genetics. A realization that work-related factors such as organizational culture, job demands, and leadership styles have a significant influence on personality has inspired studies that focus on identifying the role of personality in influencing workplace outcomes. Various aspects of work such as job satisfaction, team dynamics, job performance, and satisfaction are significantly influenced by personality.
III. Theories of Personality
An organization should be conversant with theories and models as they apply to organizational behavior. Five major personality theories explain the individual’s personality. First, the trait theory is an essential theory for understanding employee personality in the workplace. Traits theory posits that the personal characteristics of an employee will remain stable across time and in various situations. The idiographic stance on traits as advocated by Gordon Allport considers traits as the tools through which one filters experience to impose a personal structure to the world that one interacts with (Boyle, Matthews, and Saklofske 2008). Comparatively, Raymond Cattell considers traits as latent constructs that have a causal effect on the individual’s behaviors and are moderated by situational factors (Boyle, Matthews, and Saklofske 2008). The traits theory is one of the most essential personality theories.
Second, the Big Five Model of Personality is one of the most dominant theories in personality research that can be traced back to the lexical hypothesis proposed by Francis Galton. The hypothesis proposed that the personality traits of an individual can be defined by one’s choice of words as they are used to differentiate oneself from others. To this end, the five personality traits advanced by the model are openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, extroversion, and agreeableness. Notably, the Big Five model is a hierarchical model that is made up of five high-order traits, with each of the higher-order traits containing lower-order facets (Roberts et al. 2005).
Third, the HEXACO and circumplex models have also emerged as important theories of personality. HEXACO model is considered a more comprehensive personality model than the Big Five model and defines individual personality based on honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), and openness to experience (O). Nonetheless, Hough et al. (2015) note that the HEXACO model cannot be more valid than the Big Five Personality model in predicting the influence of personality in workplace settings. Comparatively, the circumplex model of personality proposes that the traits are not hierarchical and tend to have a relationship with each other. The circumplex model illustrates the relationship between personality traits in a circle with the distance between two traits based on the extent to which the traits of interest are correlated to each other. Circumplex model places related dimensions close to each other in a circle while placing the weakly correlated traits further from each other. To this end, the circumplex model reveals the totality of an individual personality by revealing the interrelationship between personality dimensions.
Fourth, the social identity theory is another personality theory introduced by Henri Tafjel and John Turner. The theory posits that a personal sense of self stems from their relations to the various groups that one identifies with, with the interrelationship leading to a set of actions that conform to the norms of the associated groups (Tafjel et al. 1971). The theory points out that individuals will tend to classify themselves into social categories making it essential for an organization to consider the process of organizational identification.
Fifth, the attraction selection attrition model proposes that individuals are inseparable from the environment within which they exist. The model is founded on the theory of vocational choice which suggests that career decisions are largely influenced by the personality of a given individual. The theory of vocational choice points out that careers can be divided into social, intellectual, artistic, conventional, enterprising, and realistic careers, with a person choosing the career to pursue based on their self-evaluation process that tends to drive people towards an environment with similar people.
IV. Personality and Organizatio...