Big Five Personality Inventory - Free Essay Example

QUESTION 1: In contemporary psychology, the Big Five Personality Inventory of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which are used to describe human personality. The Big five factors are Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The Big Five structure was derived from statistical analyses of which traits tend to co-occur in peoples descriptions of themselves or other people. The underlying correlations are probabilistic, and exceptions are possible. For example, talkativeness and assertiveness are both traits associated with Extraversion, but they do not go together by logical necessity: you could imagine somebody that is assertive but not talkative. However, many studies indicate that people who are talkative are usually also assertive, which is why they go together under the broader Extraversion factor. Conscientiousness is a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement. The trai t shows a preference for planned rather than spontaneous behavior. It influences the way in which we control, regulate, and direct our impulses. Conscientiousness includes the factor known as Need for Achievement. Other than that, common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details. In my Personality Test, Conscientiousness is the lowest rate compares to other personality. This is maybe causes by my laziness attitude and don’t like well-planned. I like to be an easy person, don’t like to get screw up with those rules and regulations. This probably leads the conscientiousness to get the lowest rate. Extraversion is characterized by positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek out stimulation and the company of others. The trait is marked by pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts tend to enjoy human interactions and to be enthusiastic, talkative, assertive, and gregarious. They take pleasure in activities that involve large social gatherings, such as parties, community activities, public demonstrations, and business or political groups. Politics, teaching, sales, managing, brokering, and acting are fields that favor extraversion. An extraverted person is likely to enjoy time spent with people and find less reward in time spent alone. They tend to be energized when around other people, and they are more prone to boredom when they are by themselves. In my Personality Test, I’ve found that I got the moderate rate for my extraversion personality means I’m not really an extraversion type of person. Somehow I’ll be quiet to strangers, less talkative and if I feel I don’t want to talk and I’ll just sit at a corner and do my own thing. It’s depending on the situation that I face. Openness to Experience is a general appreciatio n for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. The trait distinguishes imaginative people from down-to-earth, conventional people. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, appreciative of art, and sensitive to beauty. They tend to be, compared to closed people, more creative and more aware of their feelings. They are more likely to hold unconventional beliefs. This personality got the 2nd ranking in my Personality Test. I like to learn something new, hope can get more knowledge and open my mind to try something that I have never tried before. I think this is the reason I get the higher score in this personality trait. Agreeableness  is a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. It’s also tends to be pleasure and accommodating in social situation. This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other prosocial behavior. According to the contemporary  personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the  five major dimensions  of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in concern for cooperation and social harmony. People who score high on this dimension are empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, helpful and more sensitive to the needs and perspectives of others. They also have an optimistic  view of  human nature. They tend to believe that most people are honest, decent, and trustworthy. Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature. They believe people are basically honest, decent, and trustworthy. I got the highest score in this personality because of my empathiness and I’m a friendly person. I like to hang out with my friends and willing to do everything as long as I capable to doing so and I can felt the feeling of my friend or people around me. Emotional stability also calls as neuroticism. Neuroticism  is a fundamental personality  trait  in the study of  psychology. Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness. People who are get high score at neuroticism part they will more respond to environmental  stress because they easily will fall at depressed mood. It also a risk factor for mental disorder such as phobia, panic disorder and other disorder. If relative to people who get low score at neuroticism part, they are more emotionally stable and less reactive to stress. I got the highest score in this personality same as agreeableness. But in my opinion, I don’t perceive myself as an emotionally unstable person. I can well manage the stress and cope it easily. I don’t get anger easily and I always calm down when I was almost lost my temper. So I don’t think myself as a emotionally unstable person. Summarize all the result I get in this Personality Test, I’ve found that I ’m more to agreeableness personality. I’m an easy person, I can make the people that mixed with me feels calm and comfortable. I don’t like to show my temper in front of my friends because it’ll be irritating and spoil the ease situation. Besides that, even though I’m more to emotional unstability, but I’m a forgiving person and I don’t like to remember what are the bad things that happened on me in the past. I’ll always find a suitable way to reduce my stress and manage it well. More than that, I like to open myself to experiences. This personality let me gain more knowledge because I open my mind and accept new things, and not as a conventional type of person don’t like to experiences new things. According to my result, I’m just a normal extraversion person. I like to talk but seldom to strangers, I felt a little bit weird to talk to a stranger not like a real extraversion person, they can talk to anyone of a ny topic. At the last, the lowest score of my personality trait is conscientiousness. Among the Big Five, conscientiousness had the strongest positive correlation with job performance and training performance. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs score high on conscientiousness. But this does not means that I cannot be an entrepreneur. As long as I work harder and get more training, maybe I can also become an entrepreneur. I have a friend which is a bookworm and seldom mixed around with others. According to his result in the Big Five Personality Test, I’ve found that there are some similarities and differences between two of us. The similar personalities are onscientiousness and emotional stability. Both of us share the same personalities because we not a well planned person, we don’t organized and we like to follow our flow rather than a schedule. We tend to share the same emotional stability personality because we both get the highest score in the Personality Test. The differences of our personality are dominant, which are openness to experience, extraversion and agreeableness. My friend doesn’t like to experience new things because he’s a conventional person. He do not seeks new experience and have a narrow range of interest. Other than that, he is easily to express irritation with others. He lost temper easily and don’t care other’s feeling at all. He likes to be a loner and do his own thing without other disturbance. He’s quite an introversion person. He seldom to makes friend and more concerned with the inner world of the mind. He enjoys thinking, exploring his thoughts and feelings. He often avoids social situations because being around people drains his energy. In conclusion, each of us is unique. Even though we have the same personality traits stated above, but it doesn’t means that we are exactly the same as the results. Although this is not so accurate to measures the exact personality, it also can give us a guideline to let us know what are the personality traits that might have in ourselves. QUESTION 2: This â€Å"Fostering Leadership† is about identifying the problems that leaders facing and the solutions for that particular problems. Business landscape won’t stay still and is changing from time to time because of the economy, environmental degradation, social concerns, and ever-evolving technologies. So it is important for leaders to understand the changes and solve the problems otherwise they will falter or fail. The 1st issue stated in the article is Work/Family issue and leadership, and how diversity in the workforce and work/family issue impact the workplace. Recent study found that allowed woman to stay on partner track or maintain full partner status during maternity leave was much more successful in retaining its talented women than its competitors. Apart from that, the flexibility of working time helped that firm in its retention. This is because the employee feels the job satisfaction and loyal to the company, which contribute to retention. The 2nd issue is Enterprise-Level Thinking. Leaders need to think ever more roadly about what their leadership challenge is. As a leader, need to keep looking at what’s driving change and what is ongoing. The 3rd issue is Sustainability. If a leader posses self-awareness and adaptability and merge them successfully, then will likely be a good leader. More than that, If he/she can juggle the triple bottom line which is economy, environment and social impact, then he/she will have a broad set of competencies that will make he/she more competitive in the market. The 4th issue is Authenticity. Leader should treats everyone like family and the problem take care of themselves. Leader cannot be ego or hubris because this end up failing the company and eventually themselves. Without authenticity, it’s all for show and no longer relationship. After reading this article, I found that the leadership in chapter 16 of the text book, Organizational Behavior is related to the article above. It’s all concern about leadership development, what should a leader acts, and what are the criteria that a leader need. For example: leader should be more enterprise-level thinking who recognize cultural differences, and who can adapt to local market/ political/ banking/ distribution conditions. Leadership not just enhances a company’s leadership capabilities to deal with the current recession, it also positions organizations for success once the economy turns around. This can be adapted from the following sentences: increased commitment to create and deliver real value to customers, employees, and shareholders and recognizing that sustainability is a core element of that value proposition. Apart from that, I’ve found that the work/family issue is related to the chapter 6, Work versus Family Life Conflict. Work-family conflict can take two di stinct forms: work interference with family and family interference with work. From the article, if a leader can balancing the time between workplace and family, it seems can help the company in its retention and maybe will lead to more stable homes as well. In my opinion, leadership is important to all organizations. An organization cannot survive without a leader. This is because leadership involves mentoring, coaching, inspiring, motivating, build teams, generate cohesion, resolve conflicts at the group level and finally build culture and generate change at the organization level. So it’s important to foster leadership within an organization to manage and lead the whole organization. This article is very useful to all of us so that we know how to overcome the conflicts in leadership. On the other hand, this article didn’t state clearly the personality that a leader should have in an organization. A group of people tend to have common personality traits so as a gr oup of leaders. They might have common personality traits but it does not state in this article. Overall, this article is a good article and we can adapt it into fostering a leadership in an organization.