Personality at Work - and Working with Other Personalities

This is Part 3 of a three-part series on personality and the Big Five. Start with Part 1, which introduces the five traits and includes a link to the TIPI self-assessment, and Part 2, which explores how personality shapes relationships and mental health.

In the first two posts in this series, we began getting to know the Big Five traits and understanding how they ripple through our closest relationships and our psychological wellbeing. In this final post, we turn to two questions that are perhaps the most practically important: how does personality show up at work, and can it change?

The answer to the second question is yes, in ways that matter. But let’s start with the workplace.

Personality and Workplace Behaviour

Personality has been studied extensively in occupational contexts, and the findings are consistent enough to be worth understanding even if you’re not particularly interested in work psychology.

Conscientiousness is the single most consistent predictor of job performance across almost all occupations. The self-discipline, reliability, and follow-through associated with high Conscientiousness translate directly into valued workplace behaviours. This does not mean that people low in Conscientiousness cannot perform well, but it does mean they may need to work harder to create external structures that support their performance, particularly in environments with a lot of autonomy. That translates into practical strategies to stay on track and meet obligations and deadlines.

Extraversion is particularly advantageous in roles involving sales, leadership, and frequent social interaction. Extraverts tend to be perceived as more dominant and confident, and they often actively seek out social engagement in ways that build professional networks and visibility. Introverts, however, often have qualities that make them excellent in roles requiring deep focus, careful analysis, and one-on-one relationship building. Research suggests that introverted leaders are often more effective than extraverted ones in situations where the team is already highly motivated, because they are better at listening and empowering rather than directing.

Neuroticism in the workplace deserves particular attention. Moderate levels of Neuroticism, sometimes called healthy anxiety, can fuel performance, attention to detail, and a strong drive to avoid failure. But high Neuroticism under sustained workplace stress is a significant risk factor for burnout, particularly when combined with high Conscientiousness. This is the classic high-achieving, high-striving, never-enough combination that many psychologists see in their consulting rooms: people who work hard, care deeply, hold themselves to exacting standards, and eventually find that the well has run dry.

Openness is strongly associated with creativity, innovation, and adaptability to change, qualities that are increasingly valued in contemporary workplaces. But high-Openness individuals can also struggle with repetitive tasks, strict hierarchies, and environments that value compliance over exploration. They often thrive in roles that give them genuine autonomy and room to think differently.

Agreeableness has a complex relationship with workplace outcomes. High Agreeableness supports team cohesion and interpersonal harmony, but low-Agreeableness individuals are often more willing to challenge assumptions, deliver difficult feedback, and make unpopular decisions, all of which are sometimes necessary for effective leadership and organisational health. High-Agreeableness leaders, for all their warmth, can sometimes struggle to hold firm under pressure or to have the difficult conversations that good leadership requires.

Understanding your own trait profile in a work context isn’t about finding the “right” job or resigning yourself to your limitations. It’s about knowing what conditions bring out the best in you, what patterns are likely to cause problems under stress, and where you might need to be intentional rather than automatic in how you respond.

Can Personality Change?

For many years, personality was thought to be largely fixed by early adulthood. The influential psychologist William James suggested that character was “set like plaster” by the age of thirty, a view that was widely accepted for much of the twentieth century.

The current evidence suggests a more nuanced and considerably more hopeful picture.

Personality does show meaningful stability across time. The correlation between personality scores taken decades apart is significant enough that the general shape of who you are at twenty is likely still recognisable at sixty. But personality also shows systematic change across the lifespan, and this change is not random.

On average, people become more Conscientious, more Agreeable, and less Neurotic as they move through adulthood, a pattern researchers call the “maturity principle,” reflecting the idea that most people develop greater self-regulation, social responsibility, and emotional stability over time (Roberts et al., 2006). These changes are gradual and happen over years rather than weeks, but they are real and they are meaningful.

Perhaps more interestingly, there is evidence that personality can change in response to life experiences and, significantly, in response to psychological therapy. Studies examining personality change in therapy have found reductions in Neuroticism and increases in Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness following successful treatment, effects that in some studies were larger than the changes typically seen over many years of natural development (Tang et al., 2009).

This does not mean therapy is a personality transplant. The underlying temperamental tendencies that define your trait profile are unlikely to disappear. But the way those tendencies express themselves, the degree to which high Neuroticism translates into chronic anxiety, or low Agreeableness into relational conflict, or low Conscientiousness into self-criticism and chaos, can change substantially with the right kind of support.

Your Personality Is Not Your Destiny

This is the most important thing this series has tried to say: your personality is not a fixed verdict on who you are or what your life will look like. It is a starting point, a set of tendencies that shape your experience and your patterns, but that can be understood, worked with, and in meaningful ways, transformed.

The Big Five won’t tell you what career to pursue, who to love, or how to live. What it offers is something more modest and more genuinely useful: a well-validated language for the patterns you already sense in yourself, a framework for understanding why certain environments, relationships, and challenges feel the way they do, and a reminder that the traits you sometimes experience as flaws are, in another light, simply the texture of who you are.

If this series has prompted questions about your own patterns, a tendency toward anxiety, difficulty in relationships, a sense of being stuck in the same cycles at work or at home, therapy can offer a space to explore them in depth. Understanding where your patterns come from is often the first step toward having more choice about where they take you.

At Excel Psychology, our clinicians work with the whole person, not just presenting symptoms, but the underlying patterns of thought, feeling, and relating that shape how those symptoms develop and what keeps them going. Reach out if you’d like to explore whether working with one of our team might help.

References

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1

Tang, T. Z., DeRubeis, R. J., Hollon, S. D., Amsterdam, J., Shelton, R., & Schalet, B. (2009). Personality change during depression treatment. Archives of General Psychiatry, 66(12), 1322–1330.

John, O. P., Naumann, L. P., & Soto, C. J. (2008). Paradigm shift to the integrative Big Five trait taxonomy. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (3rd ed., pp. 114–158). Guilford Press.