by Dr Trish Riddell

When choosing new employees, there is a skill involved in working out how well they might fit the job.  First, it is important to have a very clear view of the type of person you are looking for – what skills, abilities and capabilities are necessary for the role they will play in your company?  Then, you have to match the candidates to that description to see who comes out best.  This might be easier when the job involves particular skills like walking a tightrope (physically not metaphorically) or being good with numbers, but is much more difficult when you are trying to choose someone who is reliable, intelligent, creative…

One answer to this has been to use personality questionnaires like the Big Five.  In order for these scales to be useful, they ought to measure something important about the way individual brains work. De Young and colleagues have been carrying out research investigating just this.  They hypothesised that, if the Big 5 traits were important concepts, they ought to correlate with key processes that are known to take place in the brain. Then, if particular parts of the brain are responsible for each individual trait, then differences in the size of that part of the brain only ought to be reflected in differences in scores on that particular measure.  They chose particular regions of the brain which they predicted would be most important for each trait:

•    Extroversion is associated with the brain’s ability to detect and process reward. People who are extrovert tend to be assertive, social and talkative. This is probably a result of the role of social contact and status as rewards for them.
•    Neuroticism is associated with the brain’s sensitivity to threat and punishment. These people are more afraid of losing out than they are of winning, and tend to be anxious, self-conscious, and irritable and have low self esteem.
•    Agreeableness is associated with the brain’s ability to detect the needs and desires of others.  People who score highly on this scale are compassionate, polite and co-operate well with others while people who score low on this scale can be aggressive and callous.
•    Conscientiousness is associated with the brain’s ability to constrain impulses, and to inhibit behaviours with immediate reward in favour of behaviours with longer term reward.  People who score high on this scale tend to have academic and occupational success and live longer!  At the positive end of the scale, people are industrious, orderly and self-disciplined while at the negative end they can be impulsive, distractible and disorganised.
•    Openness and Intellect is associated with the brain’s ability to process abstract and perceptual information flexibly and effectively. People who score high on this scale show imagination, intellectual engagement and interest in aesthetics.
In all cases, except for Openness and Intellect, the researchers showed that people who were high on a particular trait had larger brain areas as predicted for that trait.
So what does this tell us?  First, it gives additional validity to the idea of personality traits since each relies on processing in different parts of the brain.  And, more importantly, it provides a means for considering personal and staff development.  Areas of the brain can increase in size as a result of training.  Thus, if you, or one of your employees, is low on one scale, then this could be used as an area for development.  These scores do not need to be fixed if they reflect processes that take place in our extremely flexible brains.
Call to Action:  Think of an area within the Big 5 on which you would like to increase your score.  Consider what actions you could take to practice this ability on a regular basis.  This might mean thinking of the positive aspects of your day if you score low on Extroversion and high on Neuroticism, or concentrating more on other people’s needs if you want to increase your score in Agreeableness.  Practice this for at least 2 weeks and see the difference it makes.