WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

Personality concerns the characteristics inside people that explain why they do what they do. The conventional wisdom of the human resources community for many years has been that personality is largely irrelevant for understanding occupational performance, that what really matters are the reward structures where people work. Over the past few years, personality has made a comeback in organizational psychology. What are the signs of the comeback? There are three.

One is the widespread popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in the business community today; although the MBTI has all the intellectual power of elevator music, many people nonetheless find MBTI results helpful. Their intuitions are correct; even superficial knowledge of another person's personality is useful for understanding how to manage and work with that person. The second sign of the return of personality is the current enthusiasm for Emotional Intelligence (EQ). The lessons of the EQ movement are also pretty superficial, but the movement makes the useful point that there is more to career success than cognitive ability. Third, within academic psychology, it is now generally accepted that components of the Five-Factor Model predict occupational performance above and beyond what is predicted by measures of cognitive ability.

The fact that personality is now back is a political reality, not an intellectual achievement. But, given that personality is now back, how should it be conceptualized? Historically, Freud set the agenda by arguing that the most important generalization we can make about people is that everyone is somewhat neurotic, and the most important problem in life is overcoming one's neurosis. This was the wrong agenda. In our view, the most important generalization we can make about people is that they always live in groups, and that every group has a status hierarchy. Based on this, we can conclude that the big problems in life concern getting along with other people while attaining some status in one's community, i.e., getting along and getting ahead. The rest of this viewpoint, called Socioanalytic Theory, can be summarized in terms of three broad points.

1. What do people really want?

People want three things: (a) acceptance, respect, and approval; (b) status and the control of resources; (c) predictability. This very simple model of motivation tells us what bad managers do to de-motivate their subordinates. They treat their staff with disrespect. They micromanage their staff and take away their sense of control and autonomy. And they don't communicate or provide feedback. These three practices violate the most important human needs, as forecast by our model of motivation.

2. What is personality?

Personality should be defined from two perspectives. First, there is personality from the inside, which is called identity. This is the person you think you are and it is best defined by your hopes, dreams, aspirations, goals, and intentions — i.e., your values. Second, there is personality from the outside, which is called reputation. This is the person that others think you are and is best defined by the Five-Factor Model — i.e., in terms of self-confidence, sociability, integrity, charm, and creativity, or their opposites. There are often important disparities between a person's identity and his/her reputation, and the size of the disparity is related to career success.

3. How to measure personality?

It is important first to stipulate the agenda for personality assessment. In our view, the agenda concerns forecasting individual differences in a person's potential for getting along and getting ahead. Next, we must decide which aspect of personality we want to measure. If we want to assess personality from the inside identity then we need a measure of values. And the optimal use of such an assessment is to evaluate how well a person will fit into the culture of a specific organization, as opposed to trying to predict occupational performance. If, however, we want to assess personality from the outside reputation then we should use observer ratings (e.g., a 360-degree feedback instrument). The optimal use of assessments of reputation is to forecast occupational performance, as opposed to trying to predict person/culture fit.

If the foregoing distinctions are appropriately observed, personality and personality assessment will be indispensable tools for making decisions about people in organizations.