Personality

There are many debates about whether personality is nomothetic, a fixed behaviour when born or idiographic, moulded through experiences and environment.  Scientists still cannot determine which is correct and therefore many people’s opinions are different.  ‘Personality is the relatively stable, consistent, and distinctive set of mental and emotional characteristics a person exhibits when alone, or when interacting with people and his or her external environment.’(Business Dictionary, 2011.)  Personality traits are characteristics that describe an individual’s personality; the traits may have different degrees of strength to make a mix and therefore a unique personality for each individual.  Two opposite personalities that are commonly referred to are ‘Extrovert’ and ‘Introvert’; an introvert individual will have traits such as calm, likes being alone, quiet and shy, where as an extrovert individual will have traits such as sociable, active, expressive and risk taking.  There are many other traits and theorists have tried to breakdown traits and explain personality and have discovered ways to test it. I feel personality is developed through different experiences throughout life.  I think people may have a bad characteristic and then realise this from an argument or incident and feel they want to change themselves into a better person, I believe this is possible and personalities can change.  I also think if a child is brought up in a certain culture they will respect this culture to a certain degree and this will mould their personality for the future.  I also think everyone’s personality changes from when they were a child into adolescence, maybe not through a huge change but with experience and responsibility a person has to grow up and develop therefore either strengthening traits within their personality or developing new ones.

The Myers-Briggs type indicator is a very popular personality assessment; it involves 100questions and results in 16 different personality types.  Individual are categorised into:

·         Extroverted v introverted  E/I

·         Sensing v intuitive               S/N

·         Thinking v feeling                T/F

·         Judging v perceiving            J/P

Extroverted = outgoing, sociable

Introverted = quiet, shy

Sensing        = practical, organised

Intuitive      = look at bigger picture

Thinking      = reason and logical

Feeling        = felling and emotions

Judging       = controlling, ordered, structure

Perceiving  = flexible, spontaneous

From the 8 different personality traits, 16 different personality types can be established, for example:

ESTJ- Organisers = realistic, logical, analytical and decisive, natural leaders in business.  They like to organise and run activities.

This questionnaire is easy to carry out and gives a developed answer for each individual, however 100 questions may take some people a while to fill out.  It is a system that is used widely and therefore must be very successful for those that are using it already.

Here is Eysenck’s personality types:

This model is an easy to read method of showing different personalities and what mix of traits they contain.  For example and emotionally stable introvert is calm, careful, reliable, event-tempered ect.  It is visually easy to understand however this model does not tell each individual what they are a person would have to pick out what they think their traits are and then the model will suggest they are introvert or extrovert.  A questionnaire would have to be taken before which would determine which personality they have.

Other theories are the ‘Big 5 Model’ this is made up of the 5 traits:

Extraversion- gregarious, warm, positive versus quiet, reserved, shy.

Agreeableness – straightforward, compliant, sympathetic versus quarrelsome, oppositional and unfeeling.

Conscientiousness – achievement-oriented, dutiful, self-disciplined versus frivolous, irresponsible, disorganised.

Neuroticism – anxious, depressed, self-conscious versus calm, contented, self-assured.

Openness – creative, open-minded, intellectual versus unimaginative, traditional, narrow minded.

The big 5 model is the personality test I took on the BBC website it took 20minutes and gave a very detailed results video.  My results are shown below:

The results show I am mainly extroversion and agreeableness, this would suggest I am an active individual that is conscious of the people around me.  I feel this is correct and I do like to be social and have people around me however when meeting new people I can sometimes be shy.  I also like to be spontaneous which is a trait of and extrovert however I plan everything in advance which gives me little opportunity to be spontaneous especially as I hate it when my plans are not followed.  I am very low in openness which shocked me however listening to the result I understood that I am reasonably traditional and rather unimaginative.  I see things the way they are and generally don’t think any more about it where as many other people analyse and go into deep thought about things such as how the world got here and different experiences they have been involved in.  Another result was medium neuroticism, again I was rather shocked however I feel medium is rather suitable as my emotions fluctuate and therefore sometimes I will be extremely calm about something and then in other situations I will be anxious, nervous and rather worked up about things.  I do sometimes suddenly flip and become very neurotic.  My last result conscientiousness I am pleased with as I feel I am a conscientious person and am self-disciplined when I need to be and like to achieve things.  I feel the results of this test are rather accurate and I also learnt something about my personality so generally a successful assessment.

Such a test could be used in a recruitment process, before promotion and for development and training.  It is a relatively fast process and employees would enjoy discovering more about their personalities.  It allows employers to establish which individuals would fit into the team and organisation better and which individuals want to achieve and are more energetic and therefore will want to help the company be more successful.  The advantages of such a process are that it is consistent and the same for each applicant.  It is a process that gets through a large amount of individuals quickly and for those that are successful is gives questions that the interview can be based on.  It is a cost effective system and means employers will not judge the applicants by appearance.  However this form of assessment would mask a disability and is very impersonal.  The process may also eliminate someone who would fit into the organisation well but not the job role and may also pick someone that could have a personality clash in the organisation as to many of the same personality can cause conflict.

Personality is the characteristics and traits that make an individual who they are.  Whether the personality is taught through experiences (nurture) or is fixed for each individual (nature) it is vital and different for each and every one of us.  Employers have now started using personality test to establish whether a candidate will fit well into the culture of an organisation and also the demands of the job, this is a successful process however a recruitment, promotion, development or redundancy process should not only be based on these results other methods such as interview will need to be explored as well.  Personality test not only tell the employer about an individual but also allows and individual to explore and understand their characteristics and also teach them how to use certain traits positively.

References:

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/personality.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.trans4mind.com/personality