Essay on Analysis of Big Five Personality Dimensions

Introduction:

This essay will mainly reflect on how people behave differently while fulfilling their managerial duties within an organization, using the “Big Five Personality Model”. The essay will also provide information on how an individual’s personality caninfluence their motivation, job satisfaction, and overall work performance. The discussion will critically focus and analyzethe Big five Personality Dimensions, while relating to the theories and concepts of organizational behavior.Concrete examples and research willbe used to support the stance, as well as a situational analysis will also be conducted. This essay will highlight the practical applications of this model in shaping employee work behavior, which may result inan overall enhanced productivity.

Analysis of the “Big Five” Personality Dimensions

As hypothesized by Gurven et al. (2013), the “Five Factor Model” is built on the habitual rhetoric signifiers of human’s personality. It uses statistical techniques in order to assemble and give meaning to the signifiers. This analysis establishes a relationship between individuals’ personality and the behaviors they exhibit at their organizations (Judge et al. 2014).

Extensive research has been done on the Big Five Personality model, which initially included a list of personality trait. These traits were then grouped into five to ten folds using factor analysis (Halverson et al. 2014). According to Knezevic et al. (2016), many psychologists use five traits to describe an individual’s personality. These traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—popularly known and abbreviated as “OCEAN”. 

Openness

This is the first dimension of the Big Five Personality model, which includes emotions, ingenious ideas, unique experiences, appreciation towards art, imagination and curiosity. This dimension helps to analyze the level of creativity in individuals and their desire to learn things that are innovative and peculiar.

Conscientiousness

The second dimension of the OCEAN model deals with the consistency and persistence of an individual towards a particular goal. It reflects whether or not an individual possesses self-will and determination to accomplish a certain goal or life aim (Cobb-Clark and Schurer 2012).

Extraversion

This dimension reflects the positivity, optimism and level of confidence in an individual. High extraversion results in an urge to seek attention, and staying dominant, while less extravert individuals tend to be not friendly, self-absorbent, and unsociable (Lehmann et al. 2013).

Agreeableness

This dimension deals with trust-worthiness and helpful nature of an individual. According to Chang et al. (2012), a highly agreeable individual will be perceived as excessively submissive or inexperienced, while a person with low agreeableness will be perceived as highly competitive.

Neuroticism

This last dimension of the personality model reflects an individual’s ability to experience hostile emotions or aggressive behaviors such as anger, envy, helplessness, anguish, anxiousness and depression. This dimension demonstrates the level of self-control and mental stability of an individual (Carlo et al. 2014). For example, a person with higher stability can often be misunderstood as unconcerned, while an individual with lower stability and control can be perceived as impulsive and sensitive.

Utilizing the Big Five Personality Models as a Manager

If I was on a managerial position, I would use the five personality dimensions in the following two ways to enhance the performance, job satisfaction, motivation and productivity of the workforce. 

Scenario# 1: Practicing Openness to enhance motivation 

I will encourage employees to be open towards new and innovative ideas. This will allow them to be more imaginative and pitch in creative ideas. This will make employees believe that they are being given a voice at the organization and that there ideas matter in the decision making processes. As a manager, the final decisions to critical situations will rest in my hands; however giving an opportunity to the employees to pool in their opinions will enhance their motivation to work, increase their job satisfaction, and overall productivity. According to Peter (2010), involving employees in the decision making process makes them feel like they are valued, and makes them more responsible towards their work. Not only will they work better, but also spread positive word-of-mouth regarding their work experiences in my organization. Hence, this will be a win-win situation on both the ends.

Scenario# 2: Balancing Extraversion in Employees through Extra-Curricular Corporate events and activities

In many cases, the root cause of imbalanced extraversion in employees is the lack of communication and bonding. Many organizations have structures that doesn’t allow collaboration among the various departments. Lower communication may lead to unengaged employees, with lower motivational levels. According to Schwantes (2017), one of the reasons why 70% of employees don’t work to their maximum potential is because of low engagement levels in employees. 

To make my employees stay productive, I’ll organize corporate events and team building activities.Brady (2016) comments that team building activities in organizations not only increase employee engagement, but also develops trust between the employees, supervisors and managers. This will also create a friendly environment in the workplace, which will mitigate the problem of employees feeling aloof or excessively dominant over other employees. Every employee will be more supportive towards the other. Instead of beating each other down in the competition of getting to the managerial position, they will help each other grow and perform better to achieve the common organizational goal. 

Conclusion

An individual’s behavior depends on the interaction of his/her personality with different situations. While the situation plays a major role in shaping a person’s response, there are certain underlying personality traits that we are born with. 

The Big Five dimensions of Personality reflect the broad personality areas with grouping of numerous characteristics. If businesses and managers are able to identify the personalities of candidates during the recruitment and selection process, they will be able to assign tasks, job responsibilities and communicate more effectively, resulting in a satisfied, happy, motivated and productive workforce.