Success could have more to do with attitude and an individual’s personality than we may think. OnePoll recently asked 1000 respondents in different job roles to complete a personality questionnaire to assess how they saw themselves and examined their behaviour towards others.
The Big 5 personality questionnaire was created after scientists Costa and McCrae found that most aspects of human behaviour could be compacted down to five main personality dimensions. Their study, conducted in the 1990′s, found that these traits were extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness.
These personality dimensions have previously been shown to be linked to a number of factors – such as gender, age and even number of siblings. Our own findings demonstrate a distinct divide between an individual’s personality and the type of job role they may have, in particular, the divide between those in clerical or manual roles compared to those in higher and intermediate managerial roles.
Higher and intermediate managers:
The personality profiles of those in higher roles were markedly similar, with senior and middle management employees being more conscientious (33.4%) and open (16.6%), and the least neurotic (10.0%). These individuals need to be open, particularly to be creative and to think outside of the box during problem solving and development.
The quality of conscientiousness goes hand in hand with job success, which can be explained in terms of self-discipline and determination for achievement. Those with a conscientious personality do not often give up on a task once it has been started.
Higher and intermediate manager’s low score on neuroticism is most often expressed through emotional stability and a resistance to stress. A useful quality for those with large levels of responsibility and towering amounts of pressure.
Clerical, manual and casual workers:
On the other hand, clerical (supervisory, junior management), manual (electricians, messengers etc.), and casual workers have a very different profile. These tend to be the most agreeable (34.2%) with tendencies towards being cooperative rather than antagonistic, with a high interest in getting on with those around them through compromise.
Manual workers and those in casual roles are almost polar opposites to the profile of those in managerial roles as, despite being the most agreeable, they have the lowest scores out of all groups for openness (8.6%). This low score means that those in casual and manual roles prefer traditional interests and conventional ideas over abstract and creative ones.
So what’s the key to success? According to OnePoll; functioning well under pressure, thinking outside of the box, and an unwavering desire to achieve.
Find out more about the Big Five Questions here
[...] part of our study into the Big 5 personality questionnaire (read more here), we also looked into the different responses between the two [...]