Personality in the Workplace and the Usefulness of Personality Theories

PERSONALITY THEORIES IN THE WORKPLACE
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I. Introduction
Researchers and practitioners have become more interested in examining the role of personality in the workplace. The growth in interest can be attributed to the prevalent influence of personality on one’s behavior within the workplace. Organizations that understand the personalities of their workforce are in a unique position to make informed decisions on organizational processes such as hiring, development, and training of employees. Individual personality also has a significant influence on workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction, communication, and team dynamics. An informed understanding of the employee's personality enables the employee to create a workplace environment that maximizes the productivity of employees in the workplace. This essay will discuss the rising interest in personality in the workplace and evaluate the usefulness of personality theories to formal organizations.
II. Background Information on Personality
Everyone is a unique person with a personal set of thoughts, experiences, and feelings that can be reliably used to describe, explain, and predict human behavior. The interest in the study of human attributes can be traced back to 350 B.C.E. with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics attempts to map the traits that define a person. In the 19th Century, Francis Galton inspired the research into personality research with his introduction of lexical hypothesis theory. In the 20th Century, psychologists focused on discussing individual differences and individual traits. Notably, there are many definitions of personality. However, the most dominant definition is the view that personality is “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” (American Psychological Association n.d., p. 1). The individual’s personality is influenced by factors such as environment, culture, life experiences, and genetics. A realization that work-related factors such as organizational culture, job demands, and leadership styles have a significant influence on personality has inspired studies that focus on identifying the role of personality in influencing workplace outcomes. Various aspects of work such as job satisfaction, team dynamics, job performance, and satisfaction are significantly influenced by personality.
III. Theories of Personality
An organization should be conversant with theories and models as they apply to organizational behavior. Five major personality theories explain the individual’s personality. First, the trait theory is an essential theory for understanding employee personality in the workplace. Traits theory posits that the personal characteristics of an employee will remain stable across time and in various situations. The idiographic stance on traits as advocated by Gordon Allport considers traits as the tools through which one filters experience to impose a personal structure to the world that one interacts with (Boyle, Matthews, and Saklofske 2008). Comparatively, Raymond Cattell considers traits as latent constructs that have a causal effect on the individual’s behaviors and are moderated by situational factors (Boyle, Matthews, and Saklofske 2008...