Personality at Work
Lecturer: Reinout de Vries
Lecture 1: 31 okt 2024
Introduction
Personality at work learning goals:
You can integrate knowledge about the SRM and the HEXACO model and you can
reason about its use in assessment and team building
You can describe the (general) background, content and structure of the Personal
Globe Inventory (PGI), you can interpret PGI profiles and integrate PGI and
circumplex knowledge
You can explain the criteria to call something an (emotional) intelligence, how it is
measured and its work-related effects
You can reason about the effects of individual differences in groups and organizations
You can use personality/trait activation models to analyze personality and interview
data
You can integrate knowledge about personality (STOA/TAT), interests, values and
circumplex with the ‘fit’/team personality literature and you can make
recommendations based on it
Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and
adaptions to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environments.
This focuses on interindividual differences where people differ from each other (such as
gender, age, ethnic background, etc), cross-situational and temporal consistency and the
selection of and the interaction with environments (people select their environment).
Personality structure refers to the organization of personality traits or dimensions into
hierarchical levels, including specific units, facets, primary dimensions (such as the Big Five),
super dimensions (like the Big Two) and the general factor of personality (GFP)
“In an exciting development, several studies have converged on six rather than five
factors” (Larsen & Buss, 2010)
Other taxonomies: one factor, two factors, three factors and seven factors (most
common, not more than six factors that you can replicate)
Genetics is the study of how genes and traits are passed down from one generation to the
next, our genes can carry information that affects our health, our appearance and our
personality
Estimation of heritability (h^2) with twin data, r = correlation; MZ/DZ =
mono-/dizygotic), the formula is
Environmentality = ‘common’ (c^2) + unique (e^2) environmental
variance
1
, Common is the environment that you share with your family and unique is the
environment that is unique for you personally (like friends)
H2 kan een hele of een halve zijn, dit is het verschil tussen eeneiig of tweeeiig
Personality riddles
Missing heritability mystery, unable to explain more than 21% of personality
variation, most often much less explained, thousands of SNPs needed to explain 1% of
variance
Natural selection weeds out suboptimal adaptions to the environment, natural
selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and
change
Why do heritable individual differences in personality exist?
Selective neutrality, the absence of optimal traits, neutral mutations are changes in
DNA sequence that are neither beneficial nor detrimental to the ability of an organism
to survive and reproduce
Mutation-selection balance, high rate of mutation, offsetting selection pressures,
mutations are the source of new variation, natural selection itself does not create new
traits, it only changes the proportion of variation that is already present in the
population
Balancing selection, time and place dependent fitness pay-offs
Individual differences in traits have evolved as a function of socio-physical environmental
and genetic variations and mutations.
People tend to become higher or lower on personality traits, there is an increase of standard
deviation within 70 years, this is the maturity principle, for example, honesty-humility is
low within adolescents but increases within 70 years.
These differences are in size and efficiency of personality-relevant brain regions and the
manufacturing, proliferation and projection of a susceptibility to neurotransmitters/hormones
in these regions
The making of (manufacturing), rapid increase in the amount of (proliferation) and the
likely to be influenced or harmed (susceptibility)
These components cause individual differences in six basic personality traits
Personality paradigms:
Lexical: main trait dimensions
Interpersonal: regularities in relations with others
2
, Biological: neurobiological individual differences
Personological: psychobiographical life history
Empirical: correlates of psychiatric impairment
Psychodynamic: dealing with unconscious drives
Sources of data. Self-report data (S-data) shows identity, other-report data (O-data) shows
reputation, life-outcome data (L-data) or biodata shows the biographical data or the
personological paradigm and test data (T-data) shows projective techniques or
psychodynamic.
Scientific and practical issues:
Reliability is the quality of performing consistently well, sufficient internal
homogeneity (alpha or omega reliability), temporal stability (test-retest reliability) and
cross-rater agreement (interrater reliability ICC)
Utility, the state of being useful, profitable or beneficial, added (economical,
sociological or psychological) value of assessment
Validity refers to whether a test measures what it aims to measure, difference between
construct validity (convergent and discriminant correlations) and predictive validity
(predictor and criterion correlations)
Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in, objectivity (impartial
assessor) and scientific rigor (standard testing procedure and use of adequate norm
groups)
What is there left to learn? Enhancing expertise is needed in accuracy, what can we actually
say about personality, understanding the number and nature of personality and related
concepts (interests, intelligence), the impact of personality at work and practical experience.
Lecture 2: 07 nov 2024
Videoclips: the Social Relations Model
Social relations model (SRM): block design, variance partitioning and round-robin design.
The social relations model is a model in which you can look at different attributed and rate
other people based on these attributes, it also helps you to distinguish between different
components: target, perceiver and relationship variance (Kenny, 1995)
The target effect is to what extent other people see an individual as high or low on a
certain attribute, for example attractiveness
The perceiver effect is whether the individual perceives other people as high or low on
a certain attribute
The relationship effect, people see other people very differently, what is attractive for
one person does not mean it is attractive for another person, in every relation there
might be unique effects (interaction)
3
, The person perception is the evaluation/score someone gives to another person, this can be
composed in separate effects:
Constant: this is the average level at which perceivers view targets on a trait
Perceiver: the extent to which a perceiver sees other targets as high or low on a trait
Target: the extent to which a target is seen by perceivers as high or low on a trait
Relationship: the degree to which a given perceiver sees a given target as high or low
on a trait after controlling for perceiver and target effects
Error effect, anything that interferes with making a confident conclusion
This results in the following formula:
These are two examples of a block design. A block design is an experimental design where
the experimental units are in groups called blocks.
So, the social relations model is a model to distinguish components of person perception,
ratings can be partitioned in target, perceiver, relationship and error effects.
In a block design, several raters (perceivers/assessors) rate several different ratees
(targets/candidates), in a block design, one can distinguish
How perceivers tend to rate other and how they uniquely see others,
How target tend to be rated by others and what kind of unique behaviors they exhibit
in the presence of different raters
4
Lecturer: Reinout de Vries
Lecture 1: 31 okt 2024
Introduction
Personality at work learning goals:
You can integrate knowledge about the SRM and the HEXACO model and you can
reason about its use in assessment and team building
You can describe the (general) background, content and structure of the Personal
Globe Inventory (PGI), you can interpret PGI profiles and integrate PGI and
circumplex knowledge
You can explain the criteria to call something an (emotional) intelligence, how it is
measured and its work-related effects
You can reason about the effects of individual differences in groups and organizations
You can use personality/trait activation models to analyze personality and interview
data
You can integrate knowledge about personality (STOA/TAT), interests, values and
circumplex with the ‘fit’/team personality literature and you can make
recommendations based on it
Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and
adaptions to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environments.
This focuses on interindividual differences where people differ from each other (such as
gender, age, ethnic background, etc), cross-situational and temporal consistency and the
selection of and the interaction with environments (people select their environment).
Personality structure refers to the organization of personality traits or dimensions into
hierarchical levels, including specific units, facets, primary dimensions (such as the Big Five),
super dimensions (like the Big Two) and the general factor of personality (GFP)
“In an exciting development, several studies have converged on six rather than five
factors” (Larsen & Buss, 2010)
Other taxonomies: one factor, two factors, three factors and seven factors (most
common, not more than six factors that you can replicate)
Genetics is the study of how genes and traits are passed down from one generation to the
next, our genes can carry information that affects our health, our appearance and our
personality
Estimation of heritability (h^2) with twin data, r = correlation; MZ/DZ =
mono-/dizygotic), the formula is
Environmentality = ‘common’ (c^2) + unique (e^2) environmental
variance
1
, Common is the environment that you share with your family and unique is the
environment that is unique for you personally (like friends)
H2 kan een hele of een halve zijn, dit is het verschil tussen eeneiig of tweeeiig
Personality riddles
Missing heritability mystery, unable to explain more than 21% of personality
variation, most often much less explained, thousands of SNPs needed to explain 1% of
variance
Natural selection weeds out suboptimal adaptions to the environment, natural
selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and
change
Why do heritable individual differences in personality exist?
Selective neutrality, the absence of optimal traits, neutral mutations are changes in
DNA sequence that are neither beneficial nor detrimental to the ability of an organism
to survive and reproduce
Mutation-selection balance, high rate of mutation, offsetting selection pressures,
mutations are the source of new variation, natural selection itself does not create new
traits, it only changes the proportion of variation that is already present in the
population
Balancing selection, time and place dependent fitness pay-offs
Individual differences in traits have evolved as a function of socio-physical environmental
and genetic variations and mutations.
People tend to become higher or lower on personality traits, there is an increase of standard
deviation within 70 years, this is the maturity principle, for example, honesty-humility is
low within adolescents but increases within 70 years.
These differences are in size and efficiency of personality-relevant brain regions and the
manufacturing, proliferation and projection of a susceptibility to neurotransmitters/hormones
in these regions
The making of (manufacturing), rapid increase in the amount of (proliferation) and the
likely to be influenced or harmed (susceptibility)
These components cause individual differences in six basic personality traits
Personality paradigms:
Lexical: main trait dimensions
Interpersonal: regularities in relations with others
2
, Biological: neurobiological individual differences
Personological: psychobiographical life history
Empirical: correlates of psychiatric impairment
Psychodynamic: dealing with unconscious drives
Sources of data. Self-report data (S-data) shows identity, other-report data (O-data) shows
reputation, life-outcome data (L-data) or biodata shows the biographical data or the
personological paradigm and test data (T-data) shows projective techniques or
psychodynamic.
Scientific and practical issues:
Reliability is the quality of performing consistently well, sufficient internal
homogeneity (alpha or omega reliability), temporal stability (test-retest reliability) and
cross-rater agreement (interrater reliability ICC)
Utility, the state of being useful, profitable or beneficial, added (economical,
sociological or psychological) value of assessment
Validity refers to whether a test measures what it aims to measure, difference between
construct validity (convergent and discriminant correlations) and predictive validity
(predictor and criterion correlations)
Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in, objectivity (impartial
assessor) and scientific rigor (standard testing procedure and use of adequate norm
groups)
What is there left to learn? Enhancing expertise is needed in accuracy, what can we actually
say about personality, understanding the number and nature of personality and related
concepts (interests, intelligence), the impact of personality at work and practical experience.
Lecture 2: 07 nov 2024
Videoclips: the Social Relations Model
Social relations model (SRM): block design, variance partitioning and round-robin design.
The social relations model is a model in which you can look at different attributed and rate
other people based on these attributes, it also helps you to distinguish between different
components: target, perceiver and relationship variance (Kenny, 1995)
The target effect is to what extent other people see an individual as high or low on a
certain attribute, for example attractiveness
The perceiver effect is whether the individual perceives other people as high or low on
a certain attribute
The relationship effect, people see other people very differently, what is attractive for
one person does not mean it is attractive for another person, in every relation there
might be unique effects (interaction)
3
, The person perception is the evaluation/score someone gives to another person, this can be
composed in separate effects:
Constant: this is the average level at which perceivers view targets on a trait
Perceiver: the extent to which a perceiver sees other targets as high or low on a trait
Target: the extent to which a target is seen by perceivers as high or low on a trait
Relationship: the degree to which a given perceiver sees a given target as high or low
on a trait after controlling for perceiver and target effects
Error effect, anything that interferes with making a confident conclusion
This results in the following formula:
These are two examples of a block design. A block design is an experimental design where
the experimental units are in groups called blocks.
So, the social relations model is a model to distinguish components of person perception,
ratings can be partitioned in target, perceiver, relationship and error effects.
In a block design, several raters (perceivers/assessors) rate several different ratees
(targets/candidates), in a block design, one can distinguish
How perceivers tend to rate other and how they uniquely see others,
How target tend to be rated by others and what kind of unique behaviors they exhibit
in the presence of different raters
4
