IV.

The Big Five Personality Model

What is Big Five Personality Model?

It is a personality assessment model that taps five basic dimensions.

The concept of the "Big Five" personality traits is taken from psychology and
includes five broad domains that describe personality. These five personality
traits are used to understand the relationship between personality and various
behaviors.
These five factors are assumed to represent the basic structure behind all
personality traits. These five factors were defined and described by several
different researchers during multiple periods of research.

Human resources professionals often use the Big Five personality dimensions to help
place employees. That is because these dimensions are considered to be the
underlying traits that make up an individuals overall personality. The Big Five traits are
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism
(Emotional Stability) or OCEAN:

Openness The openness to experience dimension addresses range of

interests and fascination with novelty. Extremely open people are creative,
curious, and artistically sensitive. Those at the other end of the openness
category are conventional and find comfort in the familiar.
Conscientiousness - The conscientiousness dimension is a measure of
reliability. A high conscientious person is responsible, organized, dependable,
and persistent. Those who score low on this dimension are easily distracted,
disorganized, and unreliable.
Extroversion - This dimension captures our comfort level with relationships.
Extraverts tend to be gregarious, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional
expressiveness. They are outgoing and tend to gain energy in social situations.
In the other hand, Introverts tend to be reserved, timid and quiet.
Agreeableness - This dimension refers to an individuals prosperity to defer to
others. Highly agreeable people are cooperative, warm and trusting. It is the
tendency to be compassionate and cooperative towards others. People who
score low on agreeableness are cold, disagreeable, antagonistic.
Neuroticism - Neuroticism is also sometimes called Emotional Stability. It taps
a persons ability to withstand stress. People with positive emotional stability tend
to be calm, self-confident, and secure. Those with high negative scores tend to
be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.

How do the Big Five Traits predict behavior at work?

The preponderance of evidence shows that individuals who are dependable,
reliable, careful, thorough, able to plan, organized, hardworking, persistent, and
achievement-oriented tend to have higher job performance in most if not all

occupations. In addition, employees who score higher in conscientiousness develop

higher levels of job knowledge, probably because highly conscientious people learn
more. And higher levels of job knowledge then contribute to higher level of performance.
People who score high on emotional stability are happier than those who score
low. Of the Big Five traits, emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction,
and low stress levels. Its because high scores are more likely to be positive and
optimistic in their thinking and experience than those who are cynical.
Extraverts tend to be happier in their jobs and in their lives as a whole. They
experience more positive emotions than do introverts, and they more freely express
these feelings. Extraversion is relatively strong predictor of leadership emergence in
groups.
Individuals who score high on openness to experience are more creative in
science and art than those who score low. Because creativity is important to leadership,
open people are more likely to be effective leaders.
Agreeable individuals are better liked than disagreeable people, which explains
why they tend to do better in interpersonality oriented jobs such as customer service.
They also are more compliant and rule abiding and less likely to get into accidents as a
result.