Big Five personality traits in the workplace: investigating personality differences between employees, supervisors, managers, and entrepreneurs

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

March 28, 2023

Summary:

Personality relates to employment status. Previous studies have mainly compared the difference between entrepreneurs and managers. It remains unknown how personalities differ in entrepreneurs, managers, supervisors, and employees. In this research, we answer the questions by analyzing data from Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) that consisted of 2,415 entrepreneurs, 3,822 managers, 2,446 supervisors, and 10,897 employees. By using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and ANOVA, we found that employment status has a significant multivariate effect on personality traits (F(5, 17,159) = 172.51, p < 0.001) after taking account into demographics. Moreover, there were also significant univariate effects for Neuroticism (F(3,19502) = 16.61, P < 0.001), Openness (F(3,19502) = 3.53, P < 0.05), Agreeableness (F(3,19502) = 66.57, P < 0.001), Conscientiousness (F(3,19502) = 16.39, P < 0.001), and Extraversion (F(3,19502) = 31.61, P < 0.001) after controlling for demographics. Multiple comparisons revealed that entrepreneurs are characterized by low Neuroticism, high Openness, high Conscientiousness, and high Extraversion while managers had low Neuroticism, low Agreeableness, high Openness, high Conscientiousness, and high Extraversion. Finally, supervisors are associated with high Conscientiousness. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Published in

Frontiers in Psychology

Volume

Volume: 14:976022

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.976022

ISSN

16641078

Subjects

Notes

© 2023 Kang, Guzman and Malvaso.

Open Access

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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