Chapter 43: Personality at Work

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive, the show that gets you smart, fast.

We dig into dense research so you don't have to, pulling out the critical knowledge you need.

Today we are getting into a topic that really it affects every single one of us, whether you're a manager trying to hire an applicant taking one of those tests or, you know, just an employee trying to figure out the office.

Oh, absolutely.

We're talking about personality in the workplace.

And our source for this is it's a really comprehensive chapter from the Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology.

It's by Giles Birch and Neil Anderson.

And it's this fantastic overview of what's called industrial or organizational psychology, IO psychology for short.

And it really maps out the scientific quest to answer that one huge HR question.

Can a questionnaire, you know, self -report test actually predict who is going to be successful at their job?

It's the multi -billion dollar question, isn't it?

And our mission today is to give you a really structured summary of the literature they lay out.

We're going to track how the field evolved, what the science actually says.

You mean what traits predict what outcomes?

Exactly.

And maybe most importantly, we're going to explore this constant tension that has defined the whole industry for decades.

And that tension is really the core of our deep dive today.

It's this friction between the pure science of personality theory, you know, the academics doing the really heavy lifting, the psychometrics.

Yeah.

And then the practice of personality assessment, the commercial companies, the HR consultants who need a product that is fast, simple,

and, you know, easy to sell.

The chapter calls it fraught relations, which I think is a great way to put it.

What the scientists know and what companies actually use are often two very different things.

Because the market wants speed, but the science demands rigor.

Precisely.

And we're going to see this golf, this gap between academic best practice and what's commercially viable pop up in every single section we cover.

It really dictates the whole story of the field.

Okay.

So let's start that story.

And we're not starting now.

We're going back to a time when, believe it or not, personality testing was basically forbidden in the workplace.

Yeah.

To really understand where we are now with personality research, you have to appreciate its dark ages.

For a while, especially in North America, personality was, well, it was banished.

It was just not taken seriously for hiring decisions.

Banished.

That sounds so dramatic.

I mean, how does something that seems so fundamental like someone's character or their drive get completely kicked out of professional selection?

Well, it was mainly a North American thing starting back in the 1960s.

And the core issue was

a total lack of predictive validity.

The early research just couldn't prove that personality tests reliably predicted job performance.

So the tests were just bad.

They were all over the place.

Scattershot measures, poorly defined traits.

And the Okay.

So who were the big critics?

The first big one was from Guion and Gadier way back in 65.

They published this incredibly influential critique that basically concluded, based on the evidence at the time, that personality was a poor, unreliable predictor period.

And that was a big deal.

It was a huge deal.

And then Gazzelli's 1973 review piled on.

And the result was that personality testing for hiring just plummeted in North America.

If you were an HR in the U .S.

in the 1970s, you were all about objective stuff, cognitive tests, experience, training, not someone's disposition.

So it wasn't that they thought personality didn't matter at all.

It was more that we just didn't have the right tools to measure it or to prove that it worked.

Exactly.

The science just lacked the structure.

But, and this is a key part of the story, this was very much a tale of two continents.

While North America was pulling back, the rest of the world,

especially Europe, kept right on using personality tests.

In fact, their use often increased.

The global markets sort of kept the faith, even when U .S.

academics were saying, no, this doesn't work.

Which makes the big comeback even more interesting.

So if the rest of the world was still on board, what brought the U .S.

back into the fold?

What was the big breakthrough?

It was really two major advances, methodological and conceptual.

First, we just got a much better, much more systematic handle on what we were trying to measure.

Both personality and job performance.

Right.

We got smarter about defining the things we were trying to link together.

And second, and this is the big one.

This must be the foundation that let everything else happen.

It was.

It was the establishment of a shared leverage, a taxonomy.

It's called the five factor model or the FFM, but you probably know it as the big five.

Right.

Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Exactly.

A researcher named Digman back in 1990 really solidified this as the accepted latent model.

Latent model.

So it's like the underlying structure, the bedrock that other traits are built on.

That's a great way to put it.

Before the FFM, you had 10 different researchers studying, say, sociability, and they'd all use 10 different tests with 10 different names.

You couldn't compare the data.

It's chaos.

The big five created a common ground.

A common validated structure.

And that was the key.

Suddenly you could do large scale research.

And was there proof that this new structure was actually better?

Oh, immediately.

Evidence started pouring in.

A researcher named Salgado showed in 2003 that inventories based on the FFM had significantly greater criterion related validity.

Okay, let's break that down.

Criterion related validity.

It's just a technical way of saying they were much, much better at reliably predicting job success and other important outcomes.

The structure wasn't just neat and tidy.

It was demonstrably more effective.

It gave the field the scientific scaffolding it needed to stand back on its feet.

So, okay, the big five is the scientific gold standard.

But as soon as we say that, we run smack into that tension you mentioned.

The science versus practice gap.

Right back to it.

If the FFM is so dominant in research, why are so many of the tests you see marketed by HR firms built on like 15 or 20 different dimensions with all these custom proprietary names?

Because that's the commercial reality.

As the chapter points out, those commercial tests, they're designed to be easily marketed.

They often rely on what are called lower order models.

They offer a ton of dimensions, which sounds more detailed and impressive to a client.

Right.

It seems more bespoke.

But only a handful of those dimensions are actually, you know, psychometrically tied back to that solid FFM foundation.

It's the difference between a real medical diagnosis and one of those online symptom checkers that gives you 100 possible diseases.

A little bit, yeah.

The market wants something that looks fancy and works fast, even if the research says the five broad factors are the most robust predictors.

And that's simplification.

That's where the tension lives.

Now, I know we're about to dive deep into job performance, but the chapter covers more than that, right?

Oh, absolutely.

The bulk of the research is on performance, which we'll hit next.

But we'll also look at how personality predicts things like counterproductive behavior, leadership, how well teams work, and even the dark side of personality at work.

It's a huge field.

OK, we've got the foundation set.

Now for the big question, the one every organization is asking,

does this framework actually help us hire the best person for the job?

And to answer that, you can't just look at one or two studies.

You need to synthesize everything.

That's where meta -analysis becomes so important.

And the landmark study, the one that really cemented personalities come back.

That was the 1991 meta -analysis by Barrick and Mount.

Their big contribution was taking all these different disorganized personality scales that were out there and systematically classifying them under that common language of the big five.

And what was the big headline finding that finally put all that 60s skepticism to rest?

The headline was the undeniable power of one single trait.

And that was?

Conscientiousness.

It emerged as the strongest predictor across, well, across all occupational groups and all job performance criteria.

They found an overall correlation of .22.

OK, I have to stop you there and play devil's advocate for a second for the listener.

Because in a lot of other scientific fields, a correlation of .22 might sound, well, kind of weak.

It's an excellent and totally necessary question.

So why is that number considered such a huge deal in this context?

Because you have to think about what you're predicting.

You're taking a broad, sable personality trait and trying to predict something as incredibly complex and messy as job performance

across hundreds of different jobs, salespeople, engineers, managers.

Right, there's so many other variables at play.

A ton of them.

So in that context,

finding a consistent non -zero correlation is gold.

It means that if you systematically hire people who are more conscientious, you will, over time, make better hiring decisions than if you just ignore personality.

It gives you a real competitive edge.

So it's not a crystal ball, but it's like a reliable compass.

It points you in the right direction consistently.

That's the perfect way to think about it.

It's a dependable bearing in a very chaotic landscape.

That context is so important.

Now, were there other predictors for more specific things?

Yes, especially for training proficiency.

So how well people learn new skills on the job.

Barrick and Mount found that extraversion with a correlation of 0 .26 and openness at 0 .25 were actually stronger predictors there.

Which makes total sense, right?

If you're outgoing and comfortable in a group learning setting and you're curious and open to new ideas, you can pick things up faster.

Precisely.

So that 91 study was the first big wave.

I assume a lot more research followed to confirm it.

It did.

A decade later in 2001, Barrick, Mount, and Judge did a second order meta -analysis.

So a meta -analysis of other meta -analyses.

Wow, okay.

And it basically solidified everything.

It confirmed conscientiousness was a valid predictor for pretty much every work outcome you can measure.

Overall performance was up to 0 .27.

Supervisor ratings were 0 .31.

It just held up everywhere.

So the message is clear.

If you can only measure one thing, measure conscientiousness.

What about the other big factors?

What about emotional stability?

Emotional stability, which is basically the opposite of neuroticism, was the second most consistent predictor.

It was valid across all jobs, though the correlation was a bit weaker.

Somewhere between 0 .13 and 0 .15.

So being less anxious, less volatile.

Yeah.

It helps you do your job better.

No surprise there.

Not at all.

But there is a really fascinating twist when it comes to neuroticism.

A case where a so -called bad trait can actually be good, depending on the circumstances.

Ooh, I love these kinds of findings.

Tell me about it.

It was a study by Perkins and Core in 2005.

They looked at a specific facet of neuroticism anxiety.

And they found that for people who scored high in cognitive ability, anxiety was actually positively related to job performance.

Wait, so if you're really smart, being anxious makes you better at your job.

It seems so.

The theory is that if you have the cognitive horsepower, you can channel that nervous energy productively.

It turns into intense perfectionism, constantly double checking your work, a motivation to push harder.

But for someone with average intelligence, that same anxiety would just be paralyzing.

It would just get in the way.

It's an incredible interaction effect.

It shows you that this isn't a simple one -to -one equation.

It's always about the context and the combination of traits.

Absolutely.

Now, you'd think with all this evidence, the debate would be settled.

But it's not, is it?

Not at all.

In fact, Berrick, Mount, and Judge, in the 2001 paper, they actually suggested a moratorium on these kinds of meta -analyses.

They felt the basic questions had been answered.

And the rest of the scientific community just said, hold on a minute.

You bet they did.

Critics immediately pushed back, arguing that the fundamental problems from the 60s, things like low validity is in practice, really poor quality commercial tests, they're still not resolved.

They argued we might be celebrating too early.

Which takes us right back to that science versus practice tension.

Are the correlations we see in the real world low because personality is a weak predictor or because the tools most companies use are just not very good?

And that question leads directly to the work done using the Hogan Personality Inventory, the HPI.

Okay.

What's special about the HPI?

It's a very well -regarded theory -driven assessment.

Hogan and Holland did a meta -analysis in 2003 using only studies that employed the HPI, which let them apply much more rigorous standards.

They filtered out all the noise from lower quality tests.

What happened?

The results were frankly shocking.

The validities they found were so much stronger.

For example, emotional stability, which was usually around 0 .15.

Yes.

It jumped to a staggering 0 .43.

Conscientiousness went up to 0 .36.

Whoa, that's not just a small increase.

That's doubling or tripling the predictive power.

It completely changes the conversation.

It strongly suggests that the true power of personality isn't limited by the traits themselves, but by the quality of the instruments we use to measure them.

But I have to be the skeptic again.

Isn't this just a company, Hogan?

Using its own data to prove its own test is the best.

It feels a bit like the commercial side of that golf fighting back.

And you are absolutely right to raise that.

It is the perfect illustration of the tension.

But what the study does is serve as powerful proof of concept.

It shows what's possible with a high -fidelity tool.

It puts the burden of proof back on everyone else to show they can achieve similar results rather than just relying on these lower averaged out numbers.

So the takeaway is measurement quality is everything.

It is the whole game.

And that whole discussion about measurement quality, it naturally leads us into some of the deeper theoretical challenges that IO psychologists are wrestling with.

Right, trying to bridge that science practice gap.

And the big one, the central headache for anyone designing a test is something called the bandwidth fidelity dilemma.

It's a term from all the way back in 1965 from Cronbach and Glaser.

But it's still so relevant.

It's this fundamental trade -off.

Okay, let's define the terms.

Bandwidth is?

Bandwidth is the breadth of what you're measuring.

How many different personality factors you cover.

And fidelity is the depth, the detail and precision you can achieve within each one of those factors.

Exactly.

So a high bandwidth test gives you a quick snapshot of a lot of different things.

A high fidelity test gives you a deep,

incredibly accurate measurement of just one or two things.

The dilemma is you can't have both in a single short assessment.

And there's the rub.

Because organizations, they always want the short test, don't they?

They don't want an applicant sitting there for two hours.

Never.

The commercial pressure is always for short, fast, cheap.

And that directly conflicts with the need for a psychometrically robust,

comprehensive measurement that gives you that high fidelity you need for strong prediction.

So the manager has to choose.

Do I want a quick look at everything or a really accurate read on the

one or two traits that I know matter most for this specific job?

That's the choice.

And it leads right into the next big debate.

Broad traits versus narrow subtreats.

So instead of just looking at the big five factor of conscientiousness, we should be looking at the smaller pieces that make it up.

The research is pointing very strongly in that direction.

A big study in 2006 found that the subtreats of conscientiousness, things like dutifulness, self -discipline, orderliness, achievement striving, they actually predict performance better than the big global conscientiousness score alone.

That makes perfect sense.

If you're hiring an accountant, you probably care a lot more about orderliness and dutifulness.

Right.

But if you're hiring a startup founder, you're probably looking for extreme achievement striving and self -discipline.

The global score just averages all of that out and you lose that crucial nuance.

But again, companies stick with the big five because it's simpler.

It's easier to compare candidates.

It's that tension at work again.

It is.

And to add another layer of complexity,

it's possible that the way we measure these things is systematically underselling their value because of non -linear relationships.

Meaning the relationship isn't a straight line.

The benefit isn't constant.

Exactly.

The standard assumption is linear.

That moving from a 7 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10 on conscientiousness gives you the same performance boost as moving from a 2 to a 3.

But some research suggests that's not true.

Tell me about the asymptotic relationship.

Right.

So a study by LaHouse and others in 2005 found evidence that the relationship might be asymptotic.

Meaning it levels off.

It levels off.

You get huge gains in performance as someone moves from very low to moderately conscientious.

But once you get to a certain high point, say an 8 or 9 out of 10,

any further increases in conscientiousness give you diminishing returns.

The gains flatten out.

And in some cases, too much of a good thing could even be bad, right?

Like someone who's so conscientious, they're completely inflexible.

Or they burn out.

It suggests that hiring managers shouldn't be looking for the absolute highest score, but for an optimal range.

And if our statistical models are assuming a straight line when the reality is a curve, we are constantly underestimating the true predictive power of the trait.

That's a huge methodological problem.

Okay, before we move on, there's one other big framework we have to talk about that sort of challenges the big five's total dominance.

Core self -evaluations.

Yes.

CSE.

It's a higher order trait.

Think of it as your overall level of positive self -concept.

It's made up of four underlying components.

Self -esteem.

Generalized self -efficacy, which is your belief in your ability to get things done.

Locus of control.

So whether you believe you control your own destiny.

And emotional stability.

So it's a measure of your fundamental psychological confidence.

How does it stack up against conscientiousness in predicting job performance?

The findings from Judge and Bono back in 2001 were really compelling.

They found that these CSE traits predicted job performance just as well.

And in some cases even better than conscientiousness.

Self -esteem had a correlation of 0 .26.

Locus of control was 0 .22.

Those are right up there with the best FFN correlations we've seen.

They are.

It's strong evidence that if we want the full picture, we have to look beyond just the big five structure.

We need to include these measures of positive self -concept in our selection models to get the most powerful predictions.

Okay.

So far we've been talking about job performance as this one big thing.

But now we need to slice it a little finer.

It's not just about getting the job done.

It's also about how we get the job done.

This is a really critical distinction in the field.

It's the difference between task performance and citizenship performance.

Task performance is the straightforward stuff, right?

The technical skills listed in the job description.

Writing the code, making the sale, flying the plane.

Exactly.

And citizenship performance, which also gets called organizational citizenship behavior, or OCB, is all the other stuff.

Beyond the call of duty behaviors.

That's the perfect phrase for it.

It's helping your coworkers when they're swamped, volunteering for a committee, being punctual, just generally being a good organizational citizen.

And the reason this distinction is so important is because different things predict each one.

This is probably one of the most foundational findings in all of IO psychology.

Cognitive ability, your intelligence is the best predictor of task performance.

But personality is the best predictor of citizenship performance.

So if I need the surgeon with the steadiest hands, I should test for cognitive and motor skills.

But if I need the team member who will stay late to help and build a positive culture, I need to look at their personality.

That is the core takeaway.

And the meta -analytic data on OCB really backs this up.

An early review in 95 showed conscientiousness correlated at .22 with altruism, so helping others, and .30 with generalized compliance, like following rules.

But there was a big warning sign in that data, wasn't there?

A major red flag about how we measure this stuff.

A massive one.

It all comes down to self -reporting bias.

When the researchers filtered out studies where people were rating their own helpfulness.

Which everyone thinks they are, right?

Everyone thinks they're super helpful.

The correlation for altruism just plummeted.

It went from .22 all the way down to .04, basically zero.

Wow.

So if I ask you, are you a good team player, you'll say yes.

And it looks like a good predictor.

But if I ask your boss or your peers, the connection vanishes.

It was a huge wake -up call.

It showed that to get accurate data on citizenship, you really have to rely on supervisor or peer ratings.

But even with that challenge, a later meta -analysis in 2001 still confirmed that conscientiousness predicts citizenship performance better than it predicts task performance.

The link is real.

Okay, so the link is there.

But the chapter also brings up the idea that personality might not be acting directly on the behavior.

The path is more complicated.

Right.

This is the theory of indirect effects and suppression.

The idea is that personality influences your behavior, but it does so indirectly by shaping your attitudes or motives first.

Give me an example.

So a highly agreeable person is more likely to feel high job satisfaction.

It's that job satisfaction that then drives them to be helpful and engage in citizenship behaviors.

The personality trait is an input, but the attitude is the more direct trigger.

Okay, so that's the indirect effect.

What about suppression?

Suppression is about the organizational environment.

A toxic or highly bureaucratic workplace can suppress the positive effects of a good personality.

You might have a super conscientious employee who wants to go above and beyond.

But the company rules or their terrible manager just won't let them.

Exactly.

The context kills the predictive link.

It shows you can't just look at the person.

You have to look at the person -environment fit.

Right.

And finally, let's tie this all back to the most basic driver of performance.

Motivation.

Just the will to do the work.

A meta -analysis by Judge and Ailey has looked at this specifically, and the results will sound very familiar.

I'm guessing conscientiousness and emotional stability.

You got it.

The strongest negative predictor of motivation was neuroticism, with a correlation of negative .31.

Anxiety and self -doubt are motivation killers.

And the strongest positive one.

Conscientiousness at .24.

It just reinforces the theme.

Whether you're looking at the task itself, being a good citizen, or just the basic drive to get started, emotional stability and conscientiousness are the absolute bedrock of performance at work.

Okay.

So now we get to pivot into some of the more specific applied areas.

And we'll start with the dark side of citizenship, which is counterproductive behaviors or CPB.

Right.

All the things companies are desperate to avoid.

Everything from slacking off and wasting time to, you know, actual theft or harassing coworkers.

Exactly.

And the big question is, can personality tests help us screen these behaviors out?

A big meta -analysis in 2007 provided some pretty clear answers.

And what did they find?

They found that emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were all strong negative predictors of both interpersonal deviance, so being a jerk to your colleagues, and organizational deviance, like stealing.

Was there one trait that was the most powerful predictor?

There was.

The single strongest finding was the negative link between agreeableness and interpersonal deviance.

The correlation was negative 0 .46.

Minus 0 .46.

That is a huge correlation in this field.

That's a massive amount of predictive power.

It's enormous.

It's by far the best tool we have for screening out people who are likely to be aggressive, bullying, or just generally toxic to their colleagues.

If you're hiring for a role that requires a lot of teamwork, high agreeableness is non -negotiable.

And just to be clear on the theory here, being a bad citizen and being a good citizen, they're not just two ends of the same stick, are they?

That's a great point.

Research has shown they are two distinct things.

They are negatively correlated, of course, but you have to measure them separately.

Just because someone isn't actively deviant doesn't automatically mean they're a great organizational citizen.

They might just be neutral.

This brings us to a really fascinating idea you mentioned earlier, the creative paradox.

Organizations want good, compliant behavior, but they also desperately need innovation.

Is it possible that being too well -behaved is bad for creativity?

There's definitely an argument for it.

The research suggests that some mild forms of counterproductive behavior, things like challenging outdated rules, ignoring a silly policy to get something done, or even stealing time to work on an unauthorized passion project might be necessary evils.

So the person who bends the rules is the one who comes up with the next big idea.

These mild deviations were actually found to correlate positively with the early stages of innovation.

So the ideal innovator might not be 100 % compliant.

It creates this impossible tightrope for managers.

How do you allow just enough productive deviance to foster creativity without letting chaos take over?

What a challenge.

Okay, let's shift from the individual to the leader.

The chapter makes a pretty bold claim here.

Who leaders are determines how they lead.

It's all about personality.

And a big meta -analysis from 2002 laid out the typical FFM profile of a leader.

And what does that profile look like?

Well, leadership was positively related to extroversion, openness, and conscientiousness.

And not surprisingly, negatively related to neuroticism.

Extroversion makes sense.

You have to be assertive and outgoing.

Conscientiousness, you have to be organized and driven.

But what about agreeableness?

Where does that fit in?

That was the interesting part.

Agreeableness was only very weakly related.

The correlation was tiny, like 0 .08.

So being nice doesn't really help you be a leader.

It seems not.

And it's probably because leadership requires making tough, unpopular decisions.

It requires giving critical feedback.

If you're too agreeable, you might prioritize keeping everyone happy over making the right call for the business.

And what about that highly prized leadership style?

Transformational leadership, inspiring people to go above and beyond.

Extroversion is the key there.

It's the most consistent and significant predictor.

That ability to be energetic, to communicate a vision, that's central to transforming a team.

This all leads to a really interesting study of UK CEOs that painted this almost stereotypical picture of the person who gets the very top.

Right, Nicholson's study from 98.

It confirmed the expected profile.

High extroversion, high conscientiousness, very low neuroticism.

But the really counterintuitive finding was about agreeableness.

There was it.

They scored significantly lower on agreeableness than the general population.

So the people running the show are, on average, less nice than the people they manage.

It points to a fascinating hypothesis.

That low agreeableness might actually help you attain a leadership position.

Getting to the top often requires a certain ruthlessness, a willingness to engage in conflict.

But, and this is a huge caveat.

It helps you get the job, but it doesn't mean you'll be good at it.

Exactly.

It predicts emergence as a leader, but not necessarily subsequent success.

So it seems like personality is just crucial for who even becomes a leader in the first place, maybe even more than raw intelligence.

That's the argument.

That personality is actually a stronger predictor of leader emergence than cognitive ability is.

It's what separates the leaders from the individual contributors.

Okay, one last area here, teams.

In a world that runs on collaboration, team personality must be huge.

It is.

A study in 1998 looked at team composition and found that teams with higher average scores on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extroversion and lower neuroticism.

We're the best performing teams.

They got much higher performance ratings from their supervisors.

It's the profile of a high functioning team, organized, harmonious, engaged, and stable.

And to cap it all off, the leader's personality matters too.

A more extroverted leader tends to create a more positive team climate where people feel safe to participate and innovate.

The leader's energy really sets the tone.

We've covered the big five pretty thoroughly, but some of the most gripping research in this field is about the traits that actively destroy value.

We're talking about the dark side of personality.

Right.

These are the more dysfunctional dispositions, traits often borrowed from clinical psychology.

Things like narcissism, Machiavellianism,

psychopathy, traits that explain a lot of the toxicity and failure we see in organizations.

Let's start with narcissism.

It's a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially with leadership.

What does the actual data say about the narcissism paradox?

Judge and his colleagues described this paradox perfectly.

They found that narcissism was positively related to a person's self -reports of their own leadership and citizenship.

Of course.

Narcissists think they're amazing leaders.

They genuinely believe they are charismatic, inspiring, and incredibly helpful.

But then you ask their colleagues.

And the story changes completely.

Completely.

When you look at others' reports from peers or supervisors,

narcissism was negatively related to leadership effectiveness.

And even worse, it was positively related to deviance.

So they can talk a good game and get into power, but their actual impact is destructive.

They are brilliant at self -promotion, but they are terrible at actual management.

Their long -term effect is corrosive.

Which brings us to what might be the most provocative, even chilling finding in the entire chapter.

The study comparing corporate leaders to clinical patients.

It's a wild one.

Borden -Fritzen's 2005 study, they compared the personality profiles of UK CEOs and senior managers to patients at a secure psychiatric hospital.

And?

They found that the CEOs showed similar levels of narcissism as the clinical group.

But here's the really shocking part.

The CEOs scored significantly higher on histrionic personality than the clinical patients did.

OK, we need to break that down.

What does a histrionic personality look like in a boardroom?

And how on earth does it get selected for?

A histrionic personality is all about excessive emotionality, a need for drama,

constant attention seeking.

They have to be the center of attention at all times.

In a corporate setting, this is the person who uses big emotional displays to command a room, who manufactures crises so they can swoop in and be the hero.

We need constant validation.

Constant dramatic validation.

And the terrifying implication is that our corporate selection systems, which look for charisma and high -energy executive presence,

might be accidentally filtering for these deeply dysfunctional, destabilizing traits.

We think we're hiring a charismatic visionary, but we're actually hiring a pathological attention seeker.

It forces you to question where healthy charisma ends and clinical dysfunction begins.

And more broadly, other research confirmed that various dark side traits, paranoid, anti -social, avoidant styles, all negatively predict job performance across the board.

Dysfunctional people produce dysfunctional outcomes.

Wow.

Okay, let's shift gears completely from dysfunction to destiny.

How much does our personality drive the career paths we end up choosing in the first place?

For that, we look at Holland's six vocational personality types.

You've got realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional.

A big meta -analysis linked these types to the big five.

And were there any really strong connections?

Oh, yes.

The strongest ones were almost intuitive.

Extraversion correlated very highly with the enterprising type at .41.

These are the people who love leading, persuading, selling.

And openness was strongly linked to the artistic type .39, the imaginative, complex thinkers.

Our core personality traits really do pull us towards certain kinds of work.

Okay, so personality affects what job we choose.

But what about how successful we are on that career long -term?

Here, the findings get really counterintuitive, especially when you split success into two types.

Extrinsic success, which is money, promotions, job level.

And intrinsic success, which is your actual satisfaction with your job and career.

Right.

We know extraversion is generally good for both.

But the paradoxes are with the other traits.

I remember being shocked by this one.

Tell us the first paradox.

Conscientiousness was negatively related to intrinsic success.

So low job and career satisfaction.

Hold on.

The single best trait for being a good employee, organized, driven, reliable, also makes you miserable in your career.

It appears so.

The leading hypothesis is that the highly conscientious person is driven by these incredibly high self -imposed standards.

They're never satisfied with where they are.

They hit a goal and the goalpost immediately moves.

So they're incredibly successful by external standards, but internally they're chronically dissatisfied.

So companies are actively hiring the people who are most likely to be their least satisfied employees.

It's a profound dilemma.

And the second paradox involves agreeableness and money.

Let me guess.

Nice guys finish last.

That's pretty much it.

Agreeableness was negatively related to extrinsic success, specifically salary and promotions.

The nicer you are, the less you earn.

Highly agreeable people are less likely to push for a raise, less likely to negotiate aggressively, less likely to put themselves forward for promotions.

So they get overlooked.

That is disheartening, but it makes a kind of ruthless corporate sense.

And this stuff starts early, doesn't it?

It does.

Longitudinal data shows that your personality in childhood predicts your career success decades later.

Childhood conscientiousness predicts midlife career satisfaction.

Childhood neuroticism predicts lower salaries later in life.

Our personality foundation is a powerful long -term driver of our destiny.

Okay.

Finally, we have to touch on the big ethical question hanging over all of this.

Adverse impact.

Do these tests systematically and unfairly penalize certain minority groups?

It's a constant and critical concern.

A badly designed test could absolutely create biased hiring.

The research findings on this, though, are a bit mixed depending on where you look.

What does the research from the UK show?

Research in the UK has generally been pretty encouraging.

It's shown only small differences between ethnic subgroups, suggesting a general lack of adverse impact.

But that's not the case everywhere.

No.

Data from New Zealand, for example, found measurable differences.

Maori and Pacific Islanders tended to score higher on neuroticism and lower on extroversion than Europeans.

And if those traits are being used for hiring, that could create a systemic disadvantage.

So the big conclusion has to be that we can't just assume these tests are fair.

We absolutely cannot.

There is a demonstrable need for constant, ongoing, independent research to verify a lack of adverse impact for every test in every context.

We can't just take the commercial test publisher's word for it.

And that brings us right back to that fundamental gulf between science and practice.

So to try and wrap up this massive deep dive, we've seen that personality has this undeniable, quantifiable, and really important role at work.

And that the five -factor model has been the key to validating that.

And we know that conscientiousness is the king, the most consistent predictor of general performance.

But if you really want predictive power, you need high fidelity.

You have to look at the narrow sub -traits and use high -quality tools.

And critically, we've learned that personality is at its best when predicting contextual behaviors.

Being a good citizen, avoiding deviant actions, while raw intelligence is still the better predictor of pure technical skill.

And finally, that the dark side of personality isn't just pop psychology.

It's revealing some truly shocking and important patterns about who gets into leadership and why they sometimes fail so spectacularly.

And it all comes back to that core tension, that gulf between the nuanced academic findings, non -linear models, sub -traits, the narcissism paradox, and the simplified, easy -to -sell models that are often used in practice.

The future of the field is really about bridging that gap.

So as you, the listener, keep an eye on this space, what are the big future trends to watch for?

Well, the chapter suggests a few key areas.

There's a big push to understand the neurobiological basis of these traits.

There's a lot of work going into modeling those complex, non -linear relationships we talked about.

And of course, the investigation into the dark side is only getting deeper and more sophisticated.

Which leaves us with our final thought to mull over.

A question that directly challenges some of the simple assumptions we've talked about today.

We established that emotional stability is almost always a good thing.

It's a strong predictor of success.

But we also saw that one piece of its opposite anxiety can actually be a positive for performance, but only in highly intelligent people.

So here's the question for you to consider.

How much risk should an organization be willing to take on traits that are generally seen as negative,

like low agreeableness or a bit of anxiety, if those very same traits might be the key to unlocking unique, high -level, game -changing performance in certain specialized roles?

It's that eternal trade -off, isn't it, between the safety of predictable conformity and the high -risk, high -reward bet on mercurial, brilliant talent?

Something to think about.

Thank you so much for joining us for this deep dive into the incredibly complex world of personality at work.

We hope you feel a little smarter and ready to join the conversation.

From all of us on the Last Minute Lecture team, thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time.