Can your job change your personality?
While traditionally personality has been considered fixed and stable, recent thinking indicates that this is not the case. Personality can be changed by various work and vocational experiences, such as employment conditions, career roles, job characteristics and training or interventions.
Drawing on a wide array of research in the field, Wang and Wu provide a conceptual overview on how personality can be changed at work by societal, organisational and job-related factors, while considering how individuals can take an active approach in changing their personality at work.
Introduction The gender gap in political ambition has been well established by studies in a number of advanced democracies ( Lawless and Fox, 2005 , 2010 ; Allen and Cutts, 2018 ). Explanations at the aggregate level focus on institutionalised sexism in political parties and institutions, while individual-level explanations instead focus on gendered socialisation. More recently, attention has turned to personality traits as a possible explanation of individual-level political ambition. Individual-level personality traits have been shown to be associated
Personality is conventionally regarded as a set of stable and enduring individual characteristics that reliably differentiate individuals from one another. For instance, William James ( 1890 , p 126) said that ‘in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again’. McCrae & Costa ( 2003 , p 3) defined traits as ‘the basic dispositions that … endure through adulthood’ based on evidence they collected over the years on the longitudinal stability of personality traits. Support for personality stability also comes
We have discussed in detail the interactive relationship between work and personality change, and articulated how personality change can occur both as a result of multilevel influences from global, national and organisational contexts, and as a result of one’s deliberate and intentional efforts, with and without external intervening forces. By this time, we have established that personality change does occur at work, through both passive and active influences, and that such change can have important implications in our work and lives in general. In this final
As individuals we all have unique characteristics that make us different from one another, and personality forms one of these important characteristics. Because of our personality differences, we tend to have different ways of thinking, feeling, behaving and relating to others and approaching the world. More importantly, personality has important implications in our lives – it impacts our social and interpersonal relationships, academic and work performance, mental health and well-being and even our physical health and longevity. However, this is not to say
In Chapter 3 , we reviewed studies that investigated how individuals’ personality development is influenced by a wide range of external factors. These longitudinal studies primarily focused on personality change as a relatively passive process that requires a substantial length of time for such effects to occur. However, is there a possibility for personality change to be more actively facilitated within a shorter period, such as through purposefully designed interventions? While this idea may sound bold and potentially controversial from the personality
Introduction Carers of people with a diagnosis of personality disorder experience higher levels of strain and psychological distress than carers of people with other serious mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia ( Bailey and Grenyer, 2014 ). The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence ( NICE, 2009 ) produced guidelines for borderline personality disorder in 2009 which recommend that carers of people with this diagnosis would benefit from information about the diagnosis, care and treatment, in addition to gaining support from other
of critical theory that is most thoroughly steeped in both American public life and social science, namely The authoritarian personality ( Adorno et al, 1950 ). This massive research study, undertaken by a team led by Adorno as part of the Studies in Prejudice project at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, for the American Jewish Committee, analysed the level of prejudice and authoritarian potential (as well as the deep relationship between them) of a large and diverse sample of Americans during the late 1940s. Utilising this study, I will
Key messages Holding more agentic/masculine traits is linked to more activist political engagement. Holding more communal/feminine traits is unrelated to political engagement. Categorial gender/sex gaps in participation matter independently of gender socialised personality traits. Women participate as much as men in most areas and are more likely to do private activism. Introduction With the understanding that political participation encompasses a wide variety of activities, current research shows that women and men tend to differ in the amount
53 FIVE how does who we are shape the knowledge we produce? Doing collaborative research about personality disorders Steve Gillard, Kati Turner and Marion Neffgen introduction A strong tradition of involving people with lived experiences of using mental health services as active members of research teams has emerged over the last two decades. This has focused on adding the voice of personal experience to the research process and on introducing the idea of ‘service user- or survivor-produced knowledge’ (Sweeney et al, 2009). However, the epistemological
