Leadership

The Big Five Personality Traits

by Faizul Haque

People study business management come across all theories of personality types or traits, and the big five personality traits is one of the most common. It’s a model which explains 5 big traits for personality. It’s said that it encompasses most of the significant human personalities.

History

In year 1884, sir Francis Galton first made a query, and develop a hypothesis that says it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits, recognized as the lexical hypothesis. In the year 1936, sir Gordon Allport and S. Odbert put that hypothesis in practice where they used 4500 adjectives which they believed to be descriptive personality traits. Raymond Cattell reduced the adjectives to 171. In 1961, Raymond Christal and Ernest Tupes advanced the model, found five recurring traits. In the year of1990, J. M. Digman proposed five factor traits or model of personality. In the year 1993, finally Goldman extended this theory to the organization level. Its also known as Big Five Traits or big five personality types.

The Big five personality traits

Conscientiousness

It’s a measure of reliability and promptness. Dimensions of conscientiousness include persistence, organized, responsible, and dependable. They are thorough, and methodic. People who are less conscientious are not responsible, non-persistence, disorganized, and undependable.

Emotional Stability

It’s also called neuroticism. It includes a persons negative emotion, and his/her relation to emotional stability. Person who has high emotional stability is naturally emotionally stable, less anxiety etc.

Agreeableness

Explains the degree to agreeableness of a person.  People with high agreeableness are cooperative, friendly, and compassionate. Traits of agreeable people include affection, kindness, sympathy etc.

Openness

These people generally like to get new experience, and also want to learn new things. This kind consists of imagination, insightfulness, creativity etc. They are curious to new things.

Extroversion

Also known as extrovert, they are open to other people, and achieve their energy by interacting with them. This trait includes energy, talkativeness, and assertiveness.

Researchers have found that this theory has close relation to organizations job performance. If you can determine the specific trait of a person, you can set him/her to the specific job where he/she will perform better.

Related: Leadership Qualities, Skills, and Styles of Gautam Adani & Leadership Qualities, Skills and Style of Jack Ma

Sources

  • Tupes, E., & Christal, R. (1961). Recurrent personality factors based on trait ratings. Lackland Air Force Base, Tex.: Personnel Laboratory, Aeronautical Systems Division, Air Force Systems Command, United States Air Force.
  • Digman, J.M., Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factormodel, Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440, 1990.
  • A cross-cultural test of the “five-factor model of personality and transformational leadership” (2002).
  • Robbins, S., & Judge, T. (2007). Organizational behavior (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall.