Your Personality at Work

Hotjobs.com

By Donald Macnab

Organizations are continuously attempting to identify characteristics, traits and skills of candidates that will result in good, productive employees. Resumes, references, interviews, and tests are all designed to find out more about you as a candidate. One of the most popular methods of assessing employees is the personality test. As many as 68% of large companies use some measure of personality as part of their selection procedures.

What is personality? And how does it affect you at work? Personality is simply the way you react to your surroundings and the people around you. Psychologists have spent many years trying to discern what kind of behaviours are important and how we can describe these behaviours. They talk about personality traits. Your personality is then made up of a number of traits. Some models have as few as five traits, others as many as thirty. Names of some of the commonly measured traits are Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.

It is easy to see why an organization would want to measure your personality. If they can accurately identify your traits they can predict how you will do in a job. Many research studies have shown that personality traits can predict who will be effective in a job and who will struggle. Of course, each job comes with its own demands, requirements and needs. Personality assessment is not only important in pre-employment screening but is used throughout organizations in team building, development, and management training. No matter what you do in an organization you are likely to face a personality test at some point in your career.

Given the central role of personality assessment in the work world it is surprising how little people know about their own personalities. People rarely spend the time to become aware of their traits and how they affect their lives. Self-knowledge is one of your most important career assets. By understanding yourself and others you can identify your specific job personality and find ways to improve yourself.

To start looking at yourself you may wish to try the Personality Index listed on this website. The Personality Index looks at key features of your personality and how they influence your approach to tasks, interaction with people, the way that you think, the type of style you have at work, and how you deal with pressure and stress.

Donald Macnab is a psychologist with Psychometrics Canada.