The big five personality theory describes five broad personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Openness involves curiosity and creativity. Conscientiousness relates to self-control and goal orientation. Extraversion indicates sociability and outgoingness. Agreeableness shows empathy and cooperation. Neuroticism refers to a tendency toward psychological stress. Research suggests that different combinations of these traits are suited for various jobs and that teams work best when composed of individuals with a mix of conscientiousness and agreeableness.
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Big five Personality theory
> Big five personality traits theory
> OCEAN
> O = Openness to experience
> C = Conscientiousness
> E = Extraversion
> A = Agreeableness
> N = Neuroticism
These are the Big five personality traits….
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> 1) Openness to experience:
> Measures the person willingness to engage with new things, creative and intellectual activities
> Open-minded, Imaginative/Creative, Curious, Original, Novel in approach, Artistic
> They prefer doing different activities than narrowing down to one or few activities. They love to explore
about a lot of different things. For instance creative and entrepreneurial jobs.
Drawbacks:
1) They do not follow or find hard to follow the guidelines
2) Difficulty with practical and routine tasks
Low scorers on Openness to experience:
Traditional, Practical, calculative, focus on few things
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> Drawbacks:
> They would have trouble facing the uncertainty and change in life.
> They prefer to stay what’s familiar rather than just exploring a lot different topics.
2) Conscientiousness:
It is a measure of the person orderliness, ability to control the short-term impulses and delay gratification
for the purpose of achieving goals, objective oriented, obey rules & authority, industrious and systematic.
These individuals are better fit for the managerial and administrative jobs, that are repetitive in nature. In
the educational institutions, the conscientiousness act as a better predictor for grades.
Low scorers on conscientiousness:
Disorderly, break rules, unscheduled etc.
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3) Extraversion:
Individuals who exhibit socially engaging behaviors, enjoy meeting people, tendency to seek company of
others, expressive. The sociable task related jobs like event planner would be better suitable. Similarly the
individuals are active in group tasks.
Low scorers on Extraversion:
Reserved, prefer to work alone, on their own. Aversive towards the group tasks and socially engaging
behaviors
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4) Agreeableness:
> Measures how people tend to view and approach relationships with others.
> The individuals with these traits are trusting, sympathetic, polite, compassionate, sensitive towards others
feelings, forgiving, soft hearted, courteous, dislike conflict , arguments
> Low scorers:
> Suspicious of others, less sympathetic to others feelings i.e., they are more suspicious towards the
intentions of others and take a more critical view of the people around them in the world. It means they
do not agree to the people around them. They wouldn’t let it go.
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5) Neuroticism:
> Individuals exhibit a predisposition to psychological stress and a propensity to experience negative
emotion. Neuroticism deals with the extent of the negative perception of the events in their daily life.
> Someone who is high in Neuroticism is more likely to experience anxiety and depression.
> The reason is they mostly see the negative side of the world. It becomes the main reason for them to
experience negative feelings like anxiety, depression, nervous, emotionally volatile to others, fearful,
sensitive to negative events.
Neuroticism vs Non-neuroticism:
> They are more able to detect the threats in the environment. Whereas a person low in neuroticism could
not. They rarely get nervous, depressed or moody.
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>Now let us test our personality traits….
https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-
test
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Jobs based on the personality traits:
> Literature suggests that Openness to experience personality traits are better suitable to the entrepreneurial
and creative jobs.
> Conscientiousness traits are better suitable to the managerial and administrator job roles.
> Extraversion traits are better suitable to jobs involving group-oriented tasks, meeting people, involving
social interaction.
> Employees with Extraversion, Agreeableness traits performed better in the jobs involved dealing with
unpleasant and angry people. For instance, customer care executives.
Likewise, employees these traits also performed better in jobs with strong social skills requirement.
> Agreeableness may not be useful in the situations of objective decision making or challenging the status
quo.
> Employees with the Neuroticism traits, are not suitable for the jobs involving high stress load.
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Composition of a team with different
personality traits in an organization:
> Meta-analysis paper published in the year 2006, suggested that, the conscientiousness and agreeableness
predicted the group performance mostly.
The remaining traits like openness, extraversion and neuroticism did not show any significant effect on
the group performance.
> Therefore, the teams of the organization are to be mostly composed with the individuals possessing the
traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness to excel in the group performance.
> The individuals with the
1) Neuroticism traits maintain a strong affinity towards agreeableness traits.
2) Conscientiousness traits maintain a strong affinity towards agreeableness traits.
3) Neuroticism traits maintain a strong affinity towards extraversion traits.
4) Openness to experience traits maintain a strong affinity towards agreeableness traits.