About
Traits drive behavior, specifically workplace behavior. It’s not about what you do or what you can do, but about how you do it. Our traits are what cause us to interpret situations or words differently and place value in different things. Traits drive our natural motivations and how we approach our work.
The WorkPlace Big Five Profile™ is a personality assessment based on the Five-Factor Model of Personality, the current best-practices standard for psychologists. The assessment reveals an individual’s 5 personality supertraits and 23 subtraits that simply and clearly explain work-related behaviors found in day-to-day encounters with co-workers, employees, managers and colleagues. UVA’s Executive Search Group Search Consultants are trained and certified in the Workplace Big Five Profile and you can use this tool for both prospective and current employees.
Benefit
The assessments can help you discover more about how potential or current employees function in the workplace and how he or she can develop and utilize their natural strengths. During the recruiting process, the tool can help you increase hiring success, when used in conjunction with behavioral interviewing and reference checking. For current employees, the report can help create self-awareness for individuals to gauge their performance, engagement, job satisfaction, communication style, with the ultimate goal of increased job satisfaction.
The five key working traits are:
- Need for Stability: The degree to which an individual responds to stress. A high response to stress would be reactive; a low response to stress would be resilient.
- Extraversion: An individual’s tolerance for sensory stimulation from people and/or situations. A person with high extraversion would be more outgoing; a lower degree of extraversion would cause a person to be more reserved.
- Originality: An individual’s openness to new experiences or new ways of doing things. Those scoring lower tend to be experts in their fields; those scoring higher are usually generalists with broad interests.
- Accommodation: The degree to which we defer to others. Individuals that score lower on the Accommodation scale are comfortable with conflict; those that score higher on the scale are more adaptable.
- Consolidation: The degree to which it is natural and easy to focus on both immediate and long term goals. High scorers tend to be hard to distract from the task at hand and are described as focused; lower scorers tend to juggle multiple demands well and are regarded as flexible.