Perfect Personality Profiles (3 page)

Questionnaires are also used in development contexts. On an individual basis they can be used to help people better understand their personal style and how this might affect their performance. Insight into your personality is important in improving performance, and understanding how you naturally react to situations and people is a first step to developing more effective responses. For instance, being aware that you are the sort of person who dislikes change may help you check an immediate negative response to suggestions from others and consider them more on their merits. Being aware of how you seem to other people is also useful in adapting and developing your work style. All this can be gained through the use of personality questionnaires. Leadership development work often focuses on how people respond to others, and the use of questionnaires can facilitate this. Coaches use questionnaires with their clients to understand them better and to develop an appropriate plan of action with them.

Team building has the aim of helping groups of people to work better together. Questionnaires can help team members understand themselves and other team members better, and this can facilitate working together. When you understand why people respond as they do, it is often easier to be patient with them rather than becoming exasperated. For instance, realizing that Jose, one of the team members, likes to focus on one thing at a time will encourage you not to interrupt him unless necessary and to be less upset if he is a little impatient with you if you do interrupt him. Equally, being aware of how you come across to others may help you moderate your behaviour. For example, understanding that you are more of a risk taker than other people in the team will help you understand that their negative response to your suggestions is not personal but stems from their aversion to a more hazardous approach. You may need to set out your ideas more clearly and explain how you think the risks can be managed.

Personality questionnaires can also be useful when an employee is not performing well in a role, experiences conflict with colleagues or has other types of problems at work. The results from a questionnaires can provide insight into the individual’s behaviour, the causes of friction or a difficulty with the job itself. This understanding can be used to help improve the individual’s performance. It can sometimes identify and help the person understand a fundamental lack of fit with the role or organization and in this case may encourage a search for more suitable employment.

Career counsellors and outplacement consultants use questionnaires to understand people’s behavioural style, interests and motivation. This helps them to suggest new and adapted career tracks for clients that are likely to suit their needs but that might not have been thought of otherwise. Young people finishing their education can benefit from this help, but it can also be useful for people who are looking for a change of career in later life, perhaps after having been made redundant or giving up a job through ill health or disability. Questionnaires can also help people understand the impression they make on others at selection interviews and develop better strategies for ‘selling’ themselves to new employers. In Chapter 4 there is some discussion of how different personality styles might affect how people go about searching and applying for jobs and how they approach different types of assessment.

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What is personality?

Personality is a word used in everyday language, and in one sense it is well understood. However, the sense in which psychologists use the word is a little specialized. In everyday language we talk about people who have ‘lots of personality’ or who are ‘lacking in personality’. For psychologists everyone has personality, but the word refers specifically to people’s typical behavioural and emotional characteristics. It is what makes people into distinct individuals with their own patterns of thinking, feeling, responding to others and doing things. Someone described in everyday language as ‘having personality’ might actually be someone who is lively, animated and vivacious. Someone who is described as ‘lacking personality’ might be someone who is reserved, modest and quiet. For psychologists personality refers to people’s preferences in a range of areas, including how they relate to others, their thinking and action style and their typical feelings and emotions.

The ancient Greeks referred to ‘temperament’ and differentiated four humours – sanguine, phlegm, choler and melancholy – which Shakespeare also used to describe his characters. Chinese philosophy uses the five elements – metal, water, wood, fire and earth – to classify many things, including people’s temperament. Star signs are also associated with personality factors: Aries are said to be energetic and restless, Pisces are considered to be shy.

Although the nature of man has been discussed in philosophy and literature through the ages, it was the late nineteenth century before psychology was born as a science and personality began to be studied more carefully. Early theorists suggested that personality might be related to physical characteristics – for example, that stout people were outgoing in nature. One theory, phrenology, was based on relating irregularities in the skull to personality factors. The work of people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung was influential in changing the way that personality was perceived. Their theories were particularly concerned with how personality might develop out of early childhood experiences.

The formal measurement of personality is mostly an invention of the twentieth century. In 1936 US psychologists Gordon Allport and H.S. Odbert collected over 18,000 English language adjectives that could describe people and researched them to determine how they might be categorized and systematized. This work has been central to the development of modern personality theory. They recognized that some words referred to physical characteristics – tall and plump, for example – and some referred to very temporary states – excited and surprised. The words most relevant to personality were those that referred to more enduring or stable characteristics that were not physical, such as bold and friendly.

We concentrate on characteristics that are stable and enduring because these will characterize people and are therefore relevant in thinking about people’s behaviour over a long period – years rather than hours or days. We all have transitory moods – everyone experiences anger, sadness or exhilaration from time to time, for example – and these moods are typically a response to what is happening around us. This is not what we mean by personality. However, someone who has a tendency to anger easily might be described as fiery, excitable or irritable. These descriptions reflect a more stable characteristic or disposition, which can be thought of as part of the person’s personality.

Although personality is made up of stable characteristics, this is not to say that personality cannot change over time. Our experiences throughout our lives, particularly in childhood, influence the way we see the world and how we respond to it. Such changes could be thought of as changes to our personality, but they are just as likely to be due to our better knowledge of ourselves. We develop ways of responding that suit us and our personality. Research suggests that personality is relatively stable over time. Old people who are extroverts were almost certainly extrovert as children. However, experience can modify some aspects of personality, and particularly traumatic experiences can have a major effect. Counselling and therapy can also effect change in some aspects of personality.

There is strong evidence for a genetic component in personality. This means that some of our personality traits are inherited from our parents and grandparents. Identical twins are found to be more similar in personality than fraternal twins, and twins who are reared apart – that is, adopted by different families at birth – are often found to share personality characteristics later in life. New parents become aware of the personality of their baby even in its first few months of life. This does suggest that some aspects of personality may be ‘hard wired’ into our make-up, and it might explain why personality tends to be relatively stable over time. Because personality tends to be stable, it makes sense to take it into account when looking at the suitability of people for jobs and developing their performance at work.

Although personality is relatively unchanging, behaviour can change. Introverts can learn to be socially skilled and to interact with others. They can become effective at typically non-introvert activities such as making presentations and leading a team. Equally extroverts can learn to behave in a quiet, restrained manner, and they may learn to appreciate more internally focused experiences, such as meditating. This does not mean that extroverts have become introverts, or vice versa. Rather, each has developed a broader perspective than that which comes naturally to them and has expanded their behavioural repertoire.

Psychologists sometimes invent new words to describe specific aspects of personality – for instance, it was Freud who invented the terms extrovert and introvert. However, for the most part, ordinary words are used to describe personality, although psychologists may be more exact about what they mean by a term than when it is used in everyday speech. Many adjectives can be thought of as personality descriptors – optimistic, cantankerous, cautious, ambitious and so on. The four humours discussed above can be thought of as personality traits. The choleric person is irritable; a phlegmatic individual tends to be lethargic; the melancholic person is brooding and morose; and a sanguine person is cheerful and optimistic.

Behavioural style refers to personality characteristics that relate to how people act or respond to their environment – how they interact with other people, how they approach tasks and difficulties, how they feel and respond emotionally to things. Thus the same event or situation can be perceived positively and as attractive by one person and negatively by another. For instance, someone who is highly extrovert may be pleased to be invited to a party, look forward to the event with pleasure, behave in a lively and engaged manner at the party and afterwards feel energized by the event. Someone who is highly introverted may look forward with trepidation to a party and perhaps try to find excuses not to attend. At the party the introvert may be diffident, sitting on the sidelines and speaking to just a few very familiar people. Attending the event may be quite stressful and leave the person feeling tired and jaded with the effort of being sociable. This illustrates how personality can affect how events are perceived, how people think and feel about them and how they most naturally behave in response to those events.

Although it is difficult to control the way we perceive the world or what we think about it, we can control our behaviour. If we hear an upsetting remark or some criticism we think is unfair we can feel angry or humiliated, and we could give vent to these feelings by answering back in an angry manner or by running away. However, we do not have to act out these feelings. We can hide the degree to which the remarks affected us and offer a gentler denial or ignore the remark. It takes an effort of will to smother our feelings, but we all control our behaviour to some extent according to what we think is right or appropriate or because of the way we would like others to perceive us. It is harder to change the way we feel about the remark, to learn to take criticism as a positive learning opportunity and not to be hurt by it or become defensive. It is even harder to change the way we perceive the world, to stop seeing the remark as a criticism and to understand it as something else – the other person’s attempt to help us improve or even the result of their own need for attention rather than any real response to our performance. However, all these elements are potentially subject to our own conscious control to some degree, if we have the desire and the energy to control our more natural response.

When we describe someone’s personality we are thinking about their natural response rather than how they might have learned to respond. However, if learned responses become so well embedded that they become second nature then we can think of them as part of the personality. For most people, these learned responses are a thinner veneer, which can be maintained only with some investment of energy.

When employers measure personality they are particularly interested in how people behave in work situations. However, people do not change their personalities at work. Although they may moderate their behaviour in line with work requirements and conventions, they still have the same types of thoughts, feelings and behavioural instincts.

Personality can be broken down into a number of domains – for instance, motivation, attitudes, values, interests, behavioural style and thinking style – and we will explore some of these areas in more detail in Chapter 4. First, however, we will consider two ways of thinking about personality. These are traits and types.

Personality is often described in terms of traits or characteristics. A personality trait is a disposition to behave or respond in a particular manner. The idea of a personality trait is that it is a dimension of personality along which people can differ. We might think of people as having a little or a lot of a particular trait. Often the two extremes of a trait reflect contrasting personalities. Examples might be extrovert and introvert or highly anxious and calm people. People at either extreme of the trait typically tend to have opposite reactions to the same situation. Extroverts, for example, have a positive response to meeting new people, whereas introverts might find this rather a trial. Introverts enjoy an evening engaging in a solitary pastime such as reading or craftwork; extroverts, on the other hand, would find this at best a dull way to spend so much time.

The trait can be thought of as a continuum, with some people distinctly at one end and some people distinctly at the other. Most people, however, will be somewhere between these two extremes. We could imagine taking a class full of people and lining them up with the most anxious at the extreme right of the line and the most relaxed at the extreme left. We could order the people in the line so that everyone was at least as anxious as everyone to their left and no more anxious than everyone to their right.