Personality Is the Way That We Engage

Personality is the way that we engage with the world. It is a pattern of responses to how we engage with the world on a behavioral and emotional level. Every person has a different personality and this personality helps to frame that person's interactions with the world. When I took the test, I was INTJ, and that has implications for how I would behave in different situations.

It is important in organizations to understand what personality is, what types of personalities there are, and how these different personalities interact. Organizations are groups of people, and the characteristics of the people in these groups are a determinant of organizational success. We hear about things like "personality conflict" because at times, two different types of response patterns can be incongruent with each other. Running an organization requires an understanding of the different personality patterns and organizing the human resources of the organization in order to maximize the benefits of these interactions and minimize the downsides.

There are a number of different ways to classify personality. The Human Metrics website uses the Jung Briggs-Meyers method of classifying personality along four different dimensions. These are introversion/extroversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. These dimensions highlight the different ways that we interact with the world and from them there are sixteen different personality types. So my typology of INTJ says that I have a preference for introversion, intuition, thinking and judging.

Personality measures can be useful for managers in a few different ways. One of the roles that managers play in an organization is to manage people, so clearly it stands to benefit managers to have a better understanding of the people in the organization. In particular, understanding personality can be valuable when dealing with conflict in the organization, because the source of the conflict is often rooted in personality traits. Some are comfortable with ambiguity, while others demand clear answers, for example. Conflict can easily arise with such fundamental misunderstandings about what is important. Managers need to be able to not only understand the source of the conflict but what tactics might be effective in overcoming it.

Personality measures are also useful in matching people with the right jobs. Some personality types are more oriented to precision, perfectionism and following instructions carefully. There are jobs within the company that demand these traits, and those jobs should be matched with people for whom such things are important. Putting someone in a job that requires following instructions carefully who is not of the personality type to follow instructions is a recipe for failure. So managers can benefit from matching personality traits with the desired traits for the position in question. Someone with a strong thinking emphasis over feeling, for example, is probably ill-suited to a job dealing with too many people. Such a personality is likely to be too rational to effectively deal with people who have highly emotional responses.