Personality in the Workplace: Agreeableness
Part One of a Five-Part Series
This series delves into personality using the Big Five model as a framework to elucidate its principles. This article will provide an overview of the personality and how it shapes our experiences and interactions in the workplace, with a particular focus on team dynamics and collaboration. The trait of agreeableness will be spotlighted, examining its role in workplace interactions and its importance in optimizing compatibility between colleagues.
Overview of Personality
Your personality is a complex interplay of traits and behaviors, which form a unique and personal way of understanding and navigating both the world at large and the workplace in particular, influencing team dynamics. At the core of understanding personality is the Big Five Aspects Scale (BFAS), a widely recognized framework that breaks down personality into five essential traits, each with two nuanced aspects. These traits and their aspects provide a comprehensive view of our personality, giving us insight into our strengths and areas for development.
Agreeableness: This trait reflects our ability to be compassionate, cooperative, and likable, influencing how we relate to others in the workplace.
Compassion: Indicates our empathy, sensitivity, and concern for others' well-being.
Politeness: Represents our respectfulness and consideration for others.
Conscientiousness: Demonstrates our tendency towards reliability, organization, and discipline, affecting our work performance and dependability.
Industriousness: Shows our dedication to hard work and achievement.
Orderliness: Highlights our preference for structure and organization.
Extraversion: This trait outlines our inclination towards being sociable, enthusiastic, and assertive, shaping our interactions and influence in work settings.
Enthusiasm: Relates to our energy, sociability, and positive engagement with life.
Assertiveness: Indicates our leadership potential and confidence in expressing ourselves.
Neuroticism: Identifies our exposure to negative emotions, mood fluctuations, and stress, impacting how we cope with workplace challenges.
Volatility: Reflects our emotional stability and tendency towards mood swings.
Withdrawal: Signifies our likelihood to experience anxiety or to retreat from stress.
Openness: Captures our propensity for imagination, creativity, and diverse interests, driving innovation and adaptability in professional environments.
Intellect: Shows our curiosity and ability to engage with complex ideas.
Aesthetics: Represents our appreciation for beauty and variety in experiences.
Our personalities shape our perception of the world and influence our personal narratives, driven by the interplay of these traits. Broadening our personality involves expanding our behavioral repertoire beyond our natural inclinations, allowing us to adapt more effectively to varying circumstances and environments. This process of broadening enhances our ability to navigate life's complexities, ensuring we can respond flexibly to the diverse challenges and opportunities we encounter in the workplace.
Agreeableness
Agreeableness is the trait highlights your capacity for compassion, cooperativeness, and, in part, your likability. Fundamentally, this trait helps solve the problem of how much to weigh your own interests against those of others. The two aspects of this trait are Compassion (ability to empathize with others, be sensitive, and care for their well-being) and politeness (courteousness, respectfulness, and consideration for others).
Highly agreeable individuals tend to prioritize others' needs but may neglect their own needs and defer excessively to authority and struggle to deviate from norms when needed.
Disagreeable people negotiate for their needs and are unlikely to be exploited or form resentments. They can struggle with forgiveness, flexibility, gentleness, and patience, and may find it challenging to empathize with those who are easily rolled over or exploited.
Understanding the nuances of agreeableness helps navigate the complex landscape of human interactions, especially when it comes to finding the right balance between personal and others' interests. Individual coaching with someone who understand the five-factor personality model can greatly enhance one’s effectiveness with workplace interaction. What’s more is that organizational team trainings on this model can optimize team compatibility, significantly improving the team’s output.
Weighing the Interests of Others and Ourselves
Effective negotiation in any relationship requires assessing how much each party is advocating for themselves and the other. This means that, to arrive at an optimal solution, we must gauge how much others are negotiating for themselves and for you. For instance, if a colleague predominantly negotiates for themselves, you should reciprocate this approach by predominantly negotiating for yourself, creating a fair balance. In other words, they don’t need you to negotiate for them. If they are somewhat weighing your interests, then you would somewhat weigh theirs, which would create polarity between the both of you.
It is necessary to avoid overcommitting to others' interests if they are not reciprocating, as it can lead to an imbalance and negatively affect your own needs. Balancing the interests of others and your own is crucial for successful collaboration and productive relationships. By considering these aspects of agreeableness and maintaining equilibrium in negotiations, you can optimize workplace interactions.
Broadening Agreeableness
Broadening personality involves intentionally practicing behaviors and adopting characteristics outside our typical trait range. The behavioral changes are often challenging but equip us with more tools to navigate the world when it is not optimally suited for us. For example, individuals with narrow traits like low agreeableness may struggle when faced with situations outside their comfort zone where they might need to be a little more agreeable. Broadening personality traits empowers individuals to access a wider range of responses and adapt more effectively to diverse challenges and opportunities, enhancing their overall adaptability.
Broadening personality traits can be a complicated process. Bringing experts into your organization or hiring coaches who are informed on the matter can profoundly impact not only the quality of work but also on the morale of you and your colleagues. Whether you are a manager with direct reports or primarily work collaboratively with people on various projects, experts in the realm of personality can empower you to create a more meaningful work environment.
