Is Your Personality Impacting on Your Work Performance?

Researchers who have extensively studied how people behave in workplaces generally emphasize that personalities do not change.

"Stability in personality matters for organisations because it helps us understand people’s behavior in many work-related domains, including employee performance, social networks, employee withdrawal, and employee retention,” according to an Academy of Management Annals article.

Workplace-related research says the “Big Five” personality traits—neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—are “basic dispositions that ... endure through adulthood. Refer to my article that provides more information on the "Big Five."

The study revealed a positive relationship between neuroticism and individual variability in negative mood, which in turn predicted individual variability in performance.

From a practical point of view, their results identify neuroticism as a potential risk factor for unstable performance, but they also give room for fostering predictable performance.

Individuals with higher neuroticism may be prone to fluctuations in negative mood at work and indirectly to inconsistent performance – this highlights the necessity of personality assessment in both personnel selection and development.

Interventions aimed at stabilizing mood can be an effective lever for stabilizing work performance. You read more of interventions at my article on using Acceptance Commitment Therapy