Personality development also is said to have a positive impact on one’s communication skills and the

way he sees the world. Individuals tend to develop a positive attitude as a result of personality
development.

An individual’s personality refers to his/her appearance, characteristics, attitude, mindset and behavior
with others.

Let us go through the importance of personality development.

Personality development grooms an individual and helps him make a mark of his/her own. Individuals
need to have a style of their own for others to follow them. Do not blindly copy others. You need to set
an example for people around. Personality development not only makes you look good and presentable
but also helps you face the world with a smile.

Personality development goes a long way in reducing stress and conflicts. It encourages individuals to
look at the brighter sides of life. Face even the worst situations with a smile. Trust me, flashing your
trillion dollar smile will not only melt half of your problems but also evaporate your stress and worries.
There is no point cribbing over minor issues and problems.

Personality development helps you develop a positive attitude in life. An individual with a negative
attitude finds a problem in every situation. Rather than cribbing and criticizing people around, analyze
the whole situation and try to find an appropriate solution for the same. Remember, if there is a
problem, there has to be a solution as well. Never lose your cool. It would make the situation worse.

It is essential for individuals to behave well with people around. Being polite with others will not only
make you popular among other people but also earn you respect and pride. You can’t demand respect
by being rude with people around. Personality development plays an important role in developing not
only your outer but also inner self. Human being is a social animal. One needs people around. An
individual needs to have that magnetic power which attracts people towards him. You need to have that
charisma of yours. Personality development helps you gain recognition and acceptance from the society
as well as people around.

Personality development plays an essential role not only in an individual’s professional but also personal
lives. It makes an individual disciplined, punctual and an asset for his/her organization. An in-disciplined
individual finds it difficult to survive in the long run. Personality development teaches you to respect not
only your Boss and fellow workers but also family members, friends, neighbours, relatives and so on.
Never make fun of anyone at the workplace. Avoid criticizing and making fun of your fellow workers.

One should never carry his/her attitude or personal grudges to work. Office is not a place where you can
be rude to others just because you had a fight with your friend last night. Personality development
sessions help you differentiate between your personal as well as professional life. It is really essential to
keep a balance between both the lives to lead a peaceful and stress free life.

Personality development helps an individual to inculcate positive qualities like punctuality, flexible
attitude, willingness to learn, friendly nature, eagerness to help others and so on. Never hesitate to
share information with others. Always reach office on time. Some people have a tendency to work till
late. Late sittings not only increase your stress levels but also spoil your personal life. Sitting till late at
the office indicates that an individual is extremely poor in time management skills.

Personality development helps you develop an impressive personality and makes you stand apart from
the rest. Personality development also plays an essential role in improving one’s communication skills.
Individuals ought to master the art of expressing their thoughts and feelings in the most desired way.
Personality development makes you a confident individual who is appreciated and respected wherever
he goes.

Components of Personality:

Most psychologists believe that these traits are usually stable and result from interaction between a
person’s genes and his environment. Let us look at them in detail:

Openness to experience- Inventive/Curious vs. Consistent/Cautious

Openness to experience refers to a person’s accepted level of imagination and includes multiple
experiences like appreciating art, experiencing various emotions and taking up adventurous ideas.
Someone who is inventive and curious is likely to have a more active intellectual thought process and
multiple/different ways of dealing with a situation or problem.

Conscientiousness- Efficient/ Organized vs. Easy-going/ Careless

It represents a planned and organized approach rather than spontaneity and randomness. A ‘structured’
person puts great value on order and control which reflects a way of approaching tasks. For example,
such a person plans a project to the last detail, in a precise manner. In certain extreme cases, it appears
somewhat obsessional or overly perfectionist. A ‘low structured’ person has a more relaxed and casual
approach to life. As long as jobs are completed, they do not worry about systems or schedules or
organization and can sometimes appear disorganized. They may miss important details or be late for
appointments. In a managerial sense, they prefer the over-view or strategic approach, rather than the
detail-oriented approach of a project.

Extraversion- Outgoing/Energetic vs. Solitary/Reserved

Extraversion implies energy, positive emotions, forcefulness, friendliness, and chattiness. The extrovert
person is sociable, outgoing and attracted to others. However, extroverts can be impulsive and
sometimes take risks without weighing the odds. Contrarily, an introvert is less concerned with others
and is more inward-looking. Generally, they have a moderate outlook and a cautious approach to work,
but lack excitement. Introverts do not want to be ‘in charge’ nor do they seek limelight. More often,
their attitude is one of a personal challenge (the inner game), rather than competition with others.

Agreeableness- Friendly/Compassionate vs. Cold/Unkind

The ability to show compassion and co-operation. It is a personality trait that can help you be an
amicable person in the workplace. Giving a cold shoulder to people you encounter on a regular basis
may not go down well and may hamper your work and progress in the long and short run.

Neuroticism- Sensitive/Nervous vs. Secure/Confident

It refers to emotional stability, control over emotions and impulses, a tendency for anger, nervousness,
despair, or susceptibility. Those with self-confidence are relaxed, optimistic, enjoy responsibility and like
to be tested. Under pressure, they react calmly and in an organized way, and have faith in their coping
ability. At work, they can deal with unexpected events easily, and present their views confidently. Those
with low confidence or emotional instability, have difficulty coping with stress. While they can assume
responsibility, they may find it to be a strain. They also question their abilities, and show pessimism. At
workplace, they like predictability and avoid complex, open-ended situations. It suggests that routine
jobs in large, supportive organizations are more likely to suit them.

4.2 The Nature of Interpersonal Space

Unlike the competing inventories of personality structure found within the multivariate-trait tradition
(e.g., Cattell, Eysenck, Costa, and McCrae), different IPC measures share the same structure, but differ in
their domains of application. For example, IPC models of personality and emotions have coexisted
comfortably for many years and are likely to continue to do so (Plutchik and Conte 1997). Four
contemporary IPC measures have quite different areas of application: The Interpersonal Adjective Scales
provide a measure of relatively normal interpersonal traits or dispositions. The Inventory of
Interpersonal Problems measures problems of living as perceived by respondents or others. The Impact
Message Inventory measures the covert reactions of respondents to different target persons
corresponding to different locations on the IPC. The Supportive Actions Scale measures tendencies to
provide various kinds of social support to others in need of assistance. It is clear from the approximately
1,000 references that appeared in Donald Kiesler’s (1996) survey of the IPC literature that both the
utility and generalizability of the IPC structure are well established.

Personality Structure

Michael C. Ashton, in Individual Differences and Personality (Third Edition), 2018

3.6 What It All Means: A Few Dimensions, But Many Personalities

Now that we have described the nature of the major categories of personality traits, it is worth
reflecting on why this knowledge matters. Essentially, the results of the lexical studies of personality
structure tell us that human personality traits can be classified into six major groups. Therefore, if you
could find an individual’s overall level of the traits within each group, then these six levels would give
you a pretty complete summary of his or her personality. Of course, some of the finer detail would
certainly be lost, because any person would show differences among the traits that fall within the same
category. (For example, two people might both be fairly high in Extraversion, but one of them might be
very outgoing and moderately lively, whereas the other might be moderately outgoing and very lively.)
But nevertheless, the six broad personality factors would together account for the important features of
personality. Note that, because the six factors are roughly uncorrelated with each other, you would
need all six to summarize people’s personalities.It might seem surprising that human personality traits
can be summarized by only six groups and, by extension, that people’s personalities can be summarized
by only these six dimensions. At first, it might even seem preposterous that something as complicated as
human personality can be reduced, even in rough outline, to only six broad characteristics. But
remember that the finding of six personality factors does not mean there are only six “types” of people.
To appreciate this point more fully, let us consider how many different “kinds” of people can be
described with these six variables.

First, suppose that, for each factor, we can discriminate among five different levels of the factor. For
example, let us say that for Agreeableness, we can divide people up into five levels, say, “very
disagreeable,” “disagreeable,” “average,” “agreeable,” and “very agreeable.” If we do this for each of
the six factors, then we could describe 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 = 15,625 different kinds of people. And, if we
could discriminate with a bit more precision, with seven levels for each factor, then we would be able to
describe nearly 118,000 different kinds of people. So, it is possible to explain a great deal of the variety
and complexity of human personality with only six basic factors. Again, this is not to say that personality
is completely accounted for by these factors—instead, the various specific traits within a given factor
will provide us with important details about a person’s personality—but we can go a long way toward
describing someone’s personality using only the six broad dimensions.

Another important implication of the results described in this chapter is that there is apparently some
similarity across cultures in the nature of the major elements of personality. Recall the languages that
were investigated in the lexical studies of personality structure described earlier in this chapter: Even
though some of these languages were closely related to each other (e.g., French with Italian, or Dutch
with German), other languages were almost completely unrelated to each other (e.g., Hungarian,
Korean, and English). Nevertheless, these languages all contained similar sets of personality-descriptive
adjectives, and this indicates that people in very different cultures are describing the same major
elements of personality. Across these diverse cultures, people talk about personality traits that can be
classified within the same six groups, and this result suggests that these six factors represent the basic
components of human personality variation. It will be interesting to examine the results of future
research involving other languages: For example, it is possible that not all six factors will be obtained
from the personality lexicons of languages spoken by very small populations and having an exclusively
oral (not written) tradition; some recent research suggests that only two very broad personality
dimensions would be found (Saucier et al., 2014).

Box 3.3

Are There Personality “Types?”

If we consider the many possible combinations of levels of the personality factors, we can describe many
distinctly different personalities. But some researchers have suggested that certain combinations of
personality trait levels are especially common and therefore make it useful to speak of a few main
“types” of people. For example, some researchers (e.g., Asendorpf, 2003) have suggested that there are
three such personality types:

1.

The resilient type: An all-around well-adjusted person, characterized by a somewhat low level of Big Five
Neuroticism (i.e., high Emotional Stability) and somewhat high levels of the other four Big Five factors.

2.

The internalizing type: A rather anxious and timid person, characterized by a low level of Big Five
Extraversion and a high level of Big Five Neuroticism. (This person is said to “internalize” his or her
emotions.)

3.

The externalizing type: A rather aggressive and impulsive person, characterized by low levels of Big Five
Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. (This person is said to “externalize” his or her emotions.)
The main problem with the idea of three personality types, however, is that these precise combinations
are not particularly common. Most people have combinations of personality trait levels that do not fit
any of the aforementioned three types (Ashton & Lee, 2009b; Costa, Herbst, McCrae, Samuels, & Ozer,
2002). For example, many people are high in both Extraversion and Neuroticism or low in Agreeableness
and high in Conscientiousness. If we try to classify people into a few types, we find that most people just
do not fit the descriptions very well. (The same problem still applies even if we look for many more
types of people.) And if we try to use personality types to predict people’s behavior, the prediction is
much less accurate than it is if personality trait levels are used Instead (Asendorpf, 2003; Ashton & Lee,
2009b; Costa et al., 2002).In some sense, the fact that people have so many different combinations of
personality trait levels is an unfortunate one for personality researchers: If there were really just a few
basic personality types, it would make research much easier. But then again, it would also make
personality a lot less interesting.

Box 3.4

Broad Factors Versus Narrow Traits

The finding that so many personality traits can be classified into six broad categories is important,
because it allows us to summarize people’s personalities very efficiently, and it gives us some direction
for future research about personality. But we should not get too carried away with this result, because it
is important to remember that the broad factors are only summaries of many narrower traits that each
has some unique aspect that is not shared with the others.

The importance of this fact can be seen when we use personality measurements to predict criterion
variables. In many cases, the criteria that we want to predict are likely to be strongly related to some
specific narrow trait, but not so strongly related to other narrow traits (even those that belong to the
same factor as does the one that we expect to be a good predictor). As a result, that specific narrow trait
would probably be a more valid predictor of the criterion than would the broad factor that combines
this narrow trait with many other narrow traits that are less relevant to the criterion. That is, if one of
the narrow traits within a factor is strongly relevant to a criterion variable, its validity will be weakened
by combining it with other narrow traits that are less relevant to that criterion. Consider the following
example. Suppose that you are interested in predicting students’ levels of academic performance.
Presumably, measurements of students’ levels of the Conscientiousness factor would be associated with
the grade point averages obtained for the students. However, some traits within Conscientiousness,
such as achievement motivation, seem likely to contribute especially strongly to academic performance
and might be strongly associated with grade point average. In contrast, other traits within
Conscientiousness, such as impulse control or neatness, seem less relevant to academic performance
and might be only weakly associated with grade point average. Therefore, if we want to predict
students’ grade point averages, we might be better off measuring students’ levels of the narrow trait
that seems most relevant to the criterion (in this case, achievement motivation) rather than the broad
factor (in this case, Conscientiousness) that contains this trait (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001a, 2001b).
So, despite the importance of the broad factors of personality, we should not forget that the narrow
traits that make up those factors are themselves important. By measuring these specific aspects of
personality, we can sometimes predict criterion variables more effectively than we could if we were to
rely only on a half-dozen major factors.