The Big-Five Personality Assessment and its Application in the Workplace

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Organisational Background
Literature Review and Critical Analysis
Organisational Analysis
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Modern-day organisational managers are highly interested in the ability of employees to meet flexibility requirements for them to suit different work environments as organisational situations change. This implies that the ability of an employee to perform well in only some specific tasks ceases from being the main criteria for selection and recruitment. According to Fleeson, “in recent years, managers have become interested in determining how well an employee’s personality and values match an organisation” (2004, p.83).

This suggests that some employees are well suited to meet organisational goals and objectives than others depending on their personality traits. Personality refers to “the total of ways in which an individual reacts and interacts with others” (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.291). It is measured by the traits that people exhibit. Research on personality in an organisational context has focused on labelling various traits, which describe employees and customers’ behaviour.

Some of the personality traits that have been established by various studies as having the ability to influence the behaviour of people include aspiration, allegiance, assertiveness, thoughtfulness, timidity, indolence, and antagonism among others (Kihlstrom, Beer & Klein 2002, p.29).

Earliest research efforts to identify personality traits that were useful in an organisation in terms of helping managers to make selection and recruitment decisions led to the establishment of long lists of traits. This provided a major challenge in their practical application within an organisation.

However, the big-five model and the Myers-Brigg type indicator were exceptional in that they focused on less number of important personality traits. The focus of this paper is to analyse the big-five model for personality in the context of the Apple Company.

Organisational Background

Apple Inc. was established in California in 1977. The company and its subsidiaries collectively called Apple engage in designing, manufacturing, and marketing of a variety products. According to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (2010), these products include, “personal computers, mobile communication and media devices, and portable digital music players…selling a variety of related software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications” (p.11).

These products run by brand names such as IPhones, Mac apple TV, iPad, iPod, and X-serve among others. The company also designs and manufactures professional computer software applications, iOS, and OS-X as some of its operating systems for its gadgets. The company stocks a variety of ITunes through which consumers can access and purchase support offerings.

Additionally, according to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (2010), “The company sells its products worldwide through its retail and online stores, direct sales force, third-party cellular network carriers, wholesalers, retailers, and value-added resellers” (p.11). The target market of the company includes education sectors, enterprises, SMBs, creative professional, and even government institutions across the globe.

Literature Review and Critical Analysis

Organisations are made up of different people who possess different traits that describe their personality. Apple Company is made up of staff from different backgrounds in terms of cultural diversities and demographic characteristics.

While demographic characteristic and cultural differences may not explain differences in personality traits for people working in an organisation, it is important to note that the more the number of people employed by organisations, including the Apple Company, the more an organisation has different personality traits to handle. Based on the goals, aims, and objectives of an organisation, the main question is whether a set of personality traits is more useful to a given organisation relative to others.

The big-five model proposes that there are five main personality attributes, which underlie many of the personality traits, which have been developed by different scholarly works. According Do and Gatica-Perez, personality traits described by the big-five factor model “are the most significant variations in human personality” (2003, p.505).

The big-five personality traits are obligingness, frankness to experience, perception, emotional firmness, and gregariousness (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.293). When managers want the gregariousness trait in employees, their assessment during a selection and recruitment process will focus on the degree of sociability and the levels of assertiveness together with gregariousness of the potential employees. Opposed to extroverts, the introverts are essentially quiet, well reserved, and timid (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.294).

In an organisational setting, extroversion is a measure of the degree of employees or customers’ comfortless with various relationships. Extroversion is an important aspect for consideration while hiring in modern organisational operation environments that require a high degree of teamwork to meet the rapidly changing organisational dynamics such as innovation of new products and services to keep organisations competitive both in the short and in the long term.

Some organisations require highly reliable people. Therefore, they consider hiring people who have personality trait of conscientiousness. “People who are highly conscientious are responsible; organised, dependable, and persistent” (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.295). This implies that persons who show low levels of conscientiousness are unreliable, highly disorganised, and distracted.

From the paradigms of emotional stability, the big-five model for personality maintains that employees in an organisation need to possess high levels of the ability to withstand work stress.

This call is perhaps important, especially where the nature of the work of an organisation emphasises quality and compliance with standards and details. Work stress may also emanate from situations where people are engaged in highly repetitive tasks.

Such tasks may require people who score highly in emotional stability assessments because people with emotional stability “tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure” (Do & Gatica-Perez 2003, p.506). Indeed, anxiousness is an intolerable trait in an organisation seeking to succeed through innovation and creativity such as the Apple Company.

Operating in an organisation, which requires people to work in a teamwork environment, emphasis is put on the significance of people to agree on decisions made through the process of teamwork interaction and/or negotiations. In this context, the personality trait of agreeableness as developed by the big-five model for personality traits assessment is crucial.

Agreeable dimension of personality “refers to an individual’s propensity to differ from others” (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.294). The big-five model suggests that highly agreeable people are have high capacities to trust, are cooperative, and warm while dealing with other people. This trait is important for a work team to achieve its mandates, especially in case an organisation is project-based. In a project-based organisation, different tasks are subdivided into subtasks, which are allocated to different people.

When such tasks are assembled, they constitute a project. In such situations, trust and cooperation are important to deliver projects that meet specifications since the quality of a project is a function of the quality of specific facets constituting it. The capacity of an individual to be creative and innovative is dependent on his or her willingness and the ability to be open to experience.

Lennox and Wolfe (2004) support this assertion claiming, “extremely open people are creative, curious, and artistically sensitive” (p.1362). Through openness to experience personality assessments, it is possible to define an individual’s fascination and ranges of interest.

The big-five personality model unifies various personality frameworks. It also establishes a direct correlation between job performance and the five personality dimensions. Ashkanasy and Daus agree with this assertion by further insisting that research on personality traits has been done on “a broad spectrum of occupations such as engineers, architects, accountants, and attorneys, managers’ sales people, semiskilled personnel, and skilled personnel” (2002, p.83).

In all groups of occupations, research finding suggest that contentiousness is a key indicator of the performance of people. Therefore, since people are the key determinants of the organisational behaviour in terms of how they perform in their work, contentiousness is related with organisational behaviour.

Research conducted on the relationship between other personality traits with job performance gives different results. For instance, the work of Fleeson (2004) shows how “predictability depends on the performance criterion and the occupational group” (p.86). The researcher also found extroversion as only predicting performance in only sales jobs and managerial positions.

This finding is consistent with the characteristics of the personality trait of extroversion as developed by the big-five model since managerial and sales jobs require high levels of socialisation (Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.103). In the research conducted by Do and Gatica-Perez, openness to experience was an important determinant of training proficiency (2003, p.518).

This finding also confirms the validity of openness to experience element of the big-five personality trait in helping organisations to make vital decisions articulated to selection, training, and development. The work of Goodstein and Lanyon (2009) produced surprising results since emotional stability was found not to influence people’s performance in jobs.

Hypothetically, people who have high feelings of security and calmness could do better in any job compared to those who are highly nervous and/or depressed. Results for the work of Goodstein and Lanyon (2009) suggest this claim is not the case. Some levels of nervousness contribute to better job performance.

Apple Company operates in the technology industry. While the above discussion of the big-five personality traits model was based on general organisations, it is important to narrow down the discussion of the model’s applicability in the technology sector industry. In the technology industry, the personality trait theories are mainly limited to user behaviour (Brinkman & Fine 2005, p.15).

Researchers endeavour to establish whether there are certain personality traits in clients, which determine their consumption patterns of electronic products and services. Butt and Phillips recognise the importance of the big-five personality model by reckoning, “the rapid global growth of mobile phone usage has reinforced the need to study the psychological, social, and economic implications of mobile telephony” (2008, p.351).

Mobile devices provide programmable platforms. This permits an organisation to develop tools for collection of data that can act as an indicator of the behaviour of users. Once the data is generated and availed to an organisation such as Apple, applications can be developed to meet the user requirements. In fact, data that is captured via tools such as Bluetooth, call logs, or even the GPRS can aid in the analysis of user spatial together with social dimensions where certain applications are found essential (Butt & Phillips 2008, p.353).

Technological organisations seeking to meet market demands produce their goods or services based on market demands as opposed to the produce-to-sale strategy. Such organisations design various communication applications and features, which are essentially tailor-made to meet the individual needs for a particular target group of customers.

Consequently, framework for data collection on personal preferences is important in driving success of technological organisations. Back, Stopfer, and Vazire et al. (2010) contend with this argument by insisting that data collection frameworks that are meant to enable an organisation to determine personal preferences of customers are crucial since they allow organisations to “ understand the impact of context on user behaviour as well as to study individual differences such as the personality of users” (p.373).

Personality traits are crucial paradigms for the description of people. The subject of personality is found important in the computing industry, in which Apple Company operates. This claim is evident in several completed studies seeking to establish the relationship between utilisation of social media including Facebook, YouTube, and other internet forms (Back, Stopfer & Vazire et al. 2010; Counts & Stecher 2009).

Mobile phones are useful devices in facilitating the process of mediation and social interactions. This suggests that they can aid incredibly in the reflection of personalities of different people (Butt & Phillips 2008, p.357).

Attempting to establish the relationship between personality of users and the behavioural aspects of people as evidenced by the data collected through various frameworks is important in the process of designing the methods of user classification using approaches that are based on the concepts of machine learning. The results yielded are beneficial for an organisation operating in the mobile phone application industry such as the Apple Company in a myriad of ways.

Research on personality traits in the computing industry indicates that personality is an important aspect for the design of user interfaces. User interfaces, which are functions of personality of the users, include the “surface colour of an application” (Brinkman & Fine, 2005, p.25). The work of Butt and Phillips (2008) indicate that personality traits such as extroversion and/or introversion are related to preferences such as the aesthetic value of a website (p.349).

Brinkman and Fine (2005) further suggest, “The personality of a user might also determine the kind of functionality the individual is disposed to use on the phone” (p.17). There is also the possibility of individual preferences driven by personalities of different people to relate with user contexts. In this context, one of the hypothetical speculations is whether extroverted persons would use their devices in similar ways with introverted persons when they are idle.

An important area of scholarly interest in the studies of the big-five personality trait model in the context of technology organisation such as the Apple Company is variation of modalities for interactions with mobile devices depending on the personality traits exhibited by users. Clear understanding of how personality traits of users influence their interaction with mobile devices is helpful in aiding an organisation such as the Apple Company to design applications meeting user preferences to encourage increased consumption.

Organisational Analysis

Upon drawing from the theoretical background developed above, the researcher engaged different organisational management staff for Apple Company in an interview to garner information on the applicability of personality trait in the process of selection and recruitment. The interviewed management personnel were from the human resource department and research, design, and development department.

The human resource department personnel were to provide information on the application of the big-five model for personality assessment at the company in recruitment and selection. On the other hand, the research, design, and development department provided information on the applicability of the model in the design process of the new applications and hardware products.

Upon interviewing the chief human resource officer (HCRO) on the criterion deployed in hiring new staff at the Apple Company, it was clear that the Apple Company is committed to maintaining success in a highly competitive market. To achieve this goal, he argued, “Employees are the most important resources that the organisation has to create innovative products that meet consumer requirements and specifications depending on their preferences.”

The process of recruitment and selection is done under the guidance of some established criterion seeking to ensure that all people selected for training and development will adapt to the culture and ways of operation of the Apple Company in the fastest way possible. Although the CHRO did not cite any personality trait as informing the criterion for selection, openness to experience comes into play at the Apple Company based on the arguments developed in the literature review section.

In fact, according to Kihlstrom, Beer, and Klein (2002), people who show high levels of openness to experience are normally creative (p.67). For the Apple Company, innovation and creativity are the main drivers of organisational success.

Hence, the company selects people who can work in a teamwork environment to add knowledge on how new products can be created and marketed effectively. In fact, the CHRO noted the value of innovation and creativity by informing the researcher that the fortunes of the company turned around between 2007and 2011.

During this time, the Apple Company received an immense success through offering iPhones, iPads, and iPods to the market. This helped to mark the era of innovative portable music players and various models of mobile phones together with personal computers.

The capacity to interact with customers is an incredible trait for a person fitting in the position of sales person at the Apple Company. In 2001, the company opened retail stores based in California and Virginia, in which customers were permitted to access various products made by the company without necessary having to buy them. For sales persons working in such stores, it is imperative for them to possess the ability to identify serious buyers and those who may not buy at any specific time.

Such a task entails the utilisation of time in the socialisation process. Hence, persons who are not highly sociable may not fit well in the sales job at the Apple Company. The big-five personality model introduces extroversion as a personality trait describing such a person (Do & Gatica-Perez 2003, p.520).

This indicates that extroversion is an important personality trait for assessment in the selection and recruitment processes of sales people at Apple Company. In fact, the CHRO explained that procurement and sales persons at the Apple Company are required to have skills in placing products (sales personnel) and bargaining from suppliers on behalf of the Apple Company (procurement personnel).

In the next phase of research at this Company, the researcher interviewed the research design and development supervisor. The first question was what the department considered essential features of the Apple products. He replied, “There is no set of essential features for Apple products.” “The new features incorporated in the new products designed by the company depend on the market needs and demand and that the company must guarantee that it is to the lead of its contestants in terms of offering ground-breaking products.

This response confirmed the importance of innovation and creativity among employees of the Apple Company as explained by the CHRO. As part of uniqueness of the Apple products, compliance with quality is an enormous consideration to which the company pays attention. This implies that people working in the research design and development department not only design and develop unique products, but also products meeting high-quality standards.

In this process, people who are attentive to instructions and details are required in the research, design, and development department. According to the big-five model for personality traits, such people are contentious (Do & Gatica-Perez 2003, p.523; Goodstein & Lanyon 2009, p.299).

The researcher also sought to know whether the Apple Company considers the preferences of users in the process of design of products by conducting studies in their personality traits. The research, design, and development supervisor revealed how the Apple Company is interested in knowing what customers feel about the usability of its products. This suggests that the evaluation of personality of users is not deployed as input into the design of Apple’s products.

Consequently, researching how personality traits of customers as suggested by the big-five personality traits model may influence the consumption of the Apple Company’s products is essential in helping the company to gain higher reception of its products. A high reception of Apple Company’s products can occur if the products innovated, designed, and manufactured can meet various needs of customers, which are dictated by their personalities.

Conclusion

Personality traits are factors that determine the appropriateness of individuals in performing different tasks within an organisation. What is the implication of the big-five model for personality traits for managers?

Based on the evidence of the significances of considering personality traits assessment in hiring people in different organisations operating in different industries, it is important for managers to do any selection based on various scores of people in terms of specific personality traits that can enhance performance of selected employees depending on organisations’ requirements.

For instance, an effort to recruit employees who score highly in a certain trait is good advice if such a personality trait is required for enhanced performance. For the Apple Company, intensive screening of potential employees in the managerial and sales vacancies for the extroversion trait is an incredible step.

Organisations including Apple the Company do not want to hire unmotivated people. Evaluation of personality traits of highly motivated people is vital. Research on the applicability of the big-five model for personality traits identifies emotional stability, conscientiousness, and extroversion as important personality traits for highly motivated persons.

Although this validates the applicability of the big-five model at the Apple Company, it is important to take into consideration situational factors including the desired levels of organisational interaction and/or the culture of the organisation. Such factors influence the relationship between performance in tasks and personality.

References

Ashkanasy, M & Daus, C 2002, ‘Emotion in the Workplace: The New Challenge for Managers’, Academy of Management Executive, vol. 11 no. 9, p. 77-89.

Back, M., Stopfer, J & Vazire, S et al. G 2010, ‘Facebook profiles reflect actual personality, not self-idealisation’, Psychological Science, vol. 21 no. 8, pp. 372-374.

Brinkman, W & Fine, N 2005, Towards customised emotional design: an explorative study of user personality and user interface skin preferences’ In Annual Conference on European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics, European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics, London.

Butt, S & Phillips, G 2008, ‘Personality and self reported mobile phone use’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 346- 360.

Counts, S & K, Stecher, K 2009, Self-presentation of personality during online profile creation: In AAAI Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), AAAI, New York, NY.

Do, T & Gatica-Perez, D 2003, ‘A very brief measure of the big-five personality domains’, Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 37 no. 13, pp. 504-528.

Fleeson, W 2004, ‘Moving personality beyond the person-situation debate: The challenge and the opportunity of within-person variability’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 13 no. 2, pp. 83–87.

Goodstein, L & Lanyon, R 2009, ‘Application of Personality Assessment To The Workplace’, Journal of Business and Psychology, vol. 13 no. 3, pp. 291-213.

Kihlstrom, J, Beer, S & Klein, B 2002, Self and identity as memory’. In Leary, M.R.; Tangney, J. Handbook of self and identity, Guilford Press, New York, NY.

Lennox, R & Wolfe, N 2004, ‘Revision of the Self-Monitoring Scale’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 3.no. 2, pp. 1361-1375.

United States Securities and Exchange Commission 2010, Apple Inc: Form 10-k for the fiscal year ended September 25, 2010, United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington D.C.

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