Personality Assessment for Employee Development: Ivory Tower or Real World?

Surgeon personality diversity across generations and subspecialties

BACKGROUND

Traditional exploration of surgical professionals' personality traits focuses on general characteristics at the domain-level of the five-factor model. Personality has been related to clinically-relevant areas such as clinical decision-making and team effectiveness, yet there is limited insight in the personality of surgeons at the facet-level of the Big Five. Here, we performed a large-scale study examining domain- and facet-variations of personality in four surgical generations and subspecialties.

METHOD

The Big Five Inventory-2, measuring the five domains and fifteen corresponding facets of personality, was distributed among all general surgery departments in the Netherlands. Surgically-interested medical students were approached via the surgical student society. A normative sample was matched for age to the surgical population. Corrected one-way analyses of variance were performed.

RESULTS

The surgical population (medical students (n = 126), surgical residents not-in-training (n = 147), surgical residents-in-training (n = 227), and surgeons (n = 539)) scored higher on open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and lower on negative emotionality relative to the normative population. Higher conscientiousness (p < 0.01) and lower negative emotionality (p < 0.001) were observed to increase per generation, together with lower open-mindedness scores in surgical residents (p < 0.001). Differences at the facet-level were present in five domains, including sub-traits such as productiveness, trust, and anxiety. Across environments, personality variances were observed in surgical subspecialty (conscientiousness, negative emotionality), teaching region (open-mindedness), and academics (open-mindedness).

CONCLUSION

We delineated nuanced personality variations across generations and subspecialties in the surgical population, marking a starting point in the introduction of personality insights in the professional domain of healthcare.

Personality in motion: How intuition and sensing personality traits relate to lower limb rebound performance

Embodied cognition asserts a symbiotic relationship between cognitive processes and the physical body, raising an intriguing question: could personality traits be intertwined with the biomechanical performance of the lower limb? This study aimed to explore this connection by examining how personality traits, assessed using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), relate to lower limb rebound power (RP) measured through the five-repetition rebound jump test. Eighty participants completed two sessions: a biomechanical analysis of hopping using an Optojump® system to measure contact time, flight time, and RP, and a personality traits assessment categorizing traits across four MBTI axes: extraversion-introversion (favorite world); sensing-intuition (information processing preference); thinking-feeling (decision making); and judging-perceiving (structure). Participant characteristics did not significantly differ across MBTI axes (p≥0.07), minimizing potential confounding factors. Notably, individuals classified as intuitive showed significantly longer flight times (p = 0.02) and larger RP (p = 0.007) compared to sensing individuals, suggesting a greater reliance on the fast stretch-shortening cycle and showcasing superior use of their lower limb structures as springs. This suggests potential implications for sports performance, with intuition individuals possibly excelling in plyometric sports. However, no significant associations were found between biomechanical performance and the other three MBTI axes (p≥0.12), challenging the initial hypothesis. This research provides initial insights into the nuanced relationship between personality traits and movement patterns, indicating the potential for tailored physical interventions to enhance adherence and optimize responses in training programs.

Mind to move: Differences in running biomechanics between sensing and intuition shod runners

Delving into the complexities of embodied cognition unveils the intertwined influence of mind, body, and environment. The connection of physical activity with cognition sparks a hypothesis linking motion and personality traits. Hence, this study explored whether personality traits could be linked to biomechanical variables characterizing running forms. To do so, 80 runners completed three randomized 50-m running-trials at 3.3, 4.2, and 5m/s during which their running biomechanics [ground contact time (tc), flight time (tf), duty factor (DF), step frequency (SF), leg stiffness (kleg), maximal vertical ground reaction force (Fmax), and maximal leg compression of the spring during stance (ΔL)] was evaluated. In addition, participants' personality traits were assessed through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. The MBTI classifies personality traits into one of two possible categories along four axes: extraversion-introversion; sensing-intuition; thinking-feeling; and judging-perceiving. This exploratory study offers compelling evidence that personality traits, specifically sensing and intuition, are associated with distinct running biomechanics. Individuals classified as sensing demonstrated a more grounded running style characterized by prolonged tc, shorter tf, higher DF, and greater ΔL compared to intuition individuals (p≤0.02). Conversely, intuition runners exhibited a more dynamic and elastic running style with a shorter tc and higher kleg than their sensing counterparts (p≤0.02). Post-hoc tests revealed a significant difference in tc between intuition and sensing runners at all speeds (p≤0.02). According to the definition of each category provided by the MBTI, sensing individuals tend to focus on concrete facts and physical realities while intuition individuals emphasize abstract concepts and patterns of information. These results suggest that runners with sensing and intuition personality traits differ in their ability to use their lower limb structures as springs. Intuition runners appeared to rely more in the stretch-shortening cycle to energetically optimize their running style while sensing runners seemed to optimize running economy by promoting more forward progression than vertical oscillations. This study underscores the intriguing interplay between personality traits of individuals and their preferred movement patterns.

Nurses' caring behavior based on personality in Indonesia: A pilot study for better-humanized healthcare services

Background: Caring behavior is influenced by psychological factors, including the characteristics of personality. However, psychological test results for nurses’ recruitment are not optimal for nursing resource development. This study aimed to determine the relationship between personality characteristics and nurses’ caring behavior in hospitals.

Design and methods: A cross-sectional design was adopted involving 153 nurses of a private hospital in Jakarta selected by convenience sampling technique. Data were also collected from the Caring Behavior Inventory (CBI-24) and Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) test results. Statistical analysis using the oneway ANOVA to identify differences in nurses’ CBI scores based on MBTI personality.

Results: The results study indicate that most of the nurses were traditionalists (75.16%), and the average CBI score (85.43±5.94) was equivalent to 85%, which means that nurses’ caring behavior was good. There were differences in the scores of caring behaviors among personality characteristics; however, these differences were not statistically significant (p=0.320; α=0.05). Furthermore, the post hoc test analysis showed that the conceptualizer nurses had the highest caring behavior score, while the experiencers had the lowest.

Conclusions: Personality characteristics, as measured by MBTI, are not related to the caring behavior of nurses. One possible reason for this result is that the MBTI does not specifically measure caring personality. Psychological tests on personality characteristics are used in career development and nurse placement. This study recommends that human resource management in healthcare use more specific tools to measure caring personality and psychological tests in healthcare staff recruitment for betterhumanized healthcare services.

Predicting judging-perceiving of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in online social forum

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a well-known personality test that assigns a personality type to a user by using four traits dichotomies. For many years, people have used MBTI as an instrument to develop self-awareness and to guide their personal decisions. Previous researches have good successes in predicting Extraversion-Introversion (E/I), Sensing-Intuition (S/N) and Thinking-Feeling (T/F) dichotomies from textual data but struggled to do so with Judging-Perceiving (J/P) dichotomy. J/P dichotomy in MBTI is a non-separable part of MBTI that have significant inference on human behavior, perception and decision towards their surroundings. It is an assessment on how someone interacts with the world when making decision. This research was set out to evaluate the performance of the individual features and classifiers for J/P dichotomy in personality computing. At the end, data leakage was found in dataset originating from the Personality Forum Café, which was used in recent researches. The results obtained from the previous research on this dataset were suggested to be overly optimistic. Using the same settings, this research managed to outperform previous researches. Five machine learning algorithms were compared, and LightGBM model was recommended for the task of predicting J/P dichotomy in MBTI personality computing.

Effect of Dark Personalities on Knowledge Hiding Behaviour at Higher Education Institutions

A key concern in the way of improving knowledge sharing practices is knowledge hiding behaviour. Literature shows that knowledge hiding is a prevalent phenomenon in organisations including higher education institutions (HEIs) and is largely determined by the personality of the knowledge holders. Thus, the present study attempts to examine the effect of dark personalities (undesirable personality traits comprising of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) on knowledge hiding behaviour of faculty members at HEIs. Based on 139 valid responses from the full-time faculty members serving in various private universities in Bangladesh, the study revealed that both Machiavellianism and psychopathy have significant positive association with knowledge hiding behaviour of the academics, whereas narcissism is insignificantly related with knowledge hiding behaviour. This study indicated that dark personalities play a key role in academics’ inclination to hide knowledge.