Big Five personality traits and career satisfaction in training and development

Personality Traits and Career Satisfaction in Training and Development Occupations: Toward a Distinctive T&D Personality Profile (Sundstrom, Lounsbury, Gibson, & Huang, 2015)

This article examines the potential for personality traits to link with training and development occupations and work success in modern organizations. The authors use the "big 5" personality traits, openness, consciousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and agreeableness, to see if any of these correlate with training and development competencies.

"Based on person -- career fit theory, we hypothesized that the trait profile would differentiate T&D from other occupations, and the traits would correlate with T&D career satisfaction (Sundstrom, Lounsbury, Gibson, & Huang, 2015)."

Basically, the authors are applying some of the techniques that can be used in various training and development tools to the actual profession itself and examines what personality principles might correlate to success in T&D occupations.

There have been several studies that have found that various personality traits can correlate to job performance in different situations. The authors state that only a couple studies have actually examined some of the aspects of personality that specifically apply to the training profession and therefore this work attempts to contribute more knowledge to that end. It can be important that work performance, career satisfaction, and career stability all reflect the fit of an individual's personality and work environment and this has been verified by various studies. There have also been other frameworks developed such as the ASA (Attraction, Selection, Attrition) Framework that proposes that employees will typically select organizations in which their personalities fit with, and if not, poor fits will typically seek other organizations.

One of the traits that the authors hypothesized will be likely to be correlated with competencies in training and development is the agreeableness personality factor that is one of the big five personality traits. Agreeableness has been correlated with T&D competencies such as cooperation, supportive behaviors, and teamwork and therefore it was hypothesized that people in T&D occupation would typically score higher on this personality factor than in other occupations. The researchers further make hypothesizes about the other personality traits such as extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness. They also use other personality models such as narrow personality traits. A selection of the results include findings such as (Sundstrom, Lounsbury, Gibson, & Huang, 2015):

Agreeableness - T&D scored significantly -- and only slightly -- higher than other occupations on agreeableness.

Emotional Stability - emotional stability did not differentiate T&D occupations.

Extraversion - Elevated scores on extraversion in T&D occupations supported the prediction based on the overlap of the content of extraversion with T&D competencies