Will changes to our personality ruin workplace culture?
ALSO: what impact does RTO have on company culture?
The summer’s over, baby. Look out the window. Summer’s gone. I know you weren’t really paying attention to work chat while the weather was good, so let’s recap on what you missed.
Last month the FInancial Times published an article by John Burn Murdoch in the form of an analysis of personality data, specifically looking at what are styled the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The paper pulled no punches with the headline, observing that conscientious was ‘in freefall’. I wanted to go deeper with this insight because it has the potential to transform how we build workplace cultures.
The research is fascinating because it surveys a consistent panel of 7000 adults each year. The drops in the traits described are in the same people over time: we’re becoming less extroverted, less conscientious and less agreeable.
Typically these five factors are regarded as a statistically reliable way to measure personality. Unlike methodologies like Myers Briggs these factors prove consistent over time and psychologists take a view that much of the variance of human personality can be understood using these factors. Interestingly these traits also prove predictive for other outcomes. Conscientiousness for example predicts academic success and job performance, neuroticism can predict mental health issues.
This matters in the context of work because teamwork is entirely predicated on the idea of us being agreeable and conscientious and to some extent leaning into whatever extroversion we feel. If teamwork has been upended then it has implications for how we build cultures. If you have a culture that is based on attentive service and building connection with customers then it’s possible that those things no longer come as standard.
If these traits are really in freefall it will be hugely consequential for work - both how we perform it and how we team with colleagues.
The vast majority of the coverage of Burn Murdoch’s analysis was positive, but there were a couple of critical posts that people dropped in the comments when I first shared it. The gist of the criticism was that the effect size of the changes was far smaller than the graph suggested.
‘The youngest age group, 39 and younger, which was the focus of all the fuss, shows mean conscientiousness score of 35.51 out of a range of 9-45 in their 2015–2017 data, the first data point available. That's actually pretty high. By the latest data point, 2023–present, it had dropped to 33.26…actually still pretty high. That's a drop of a mere 2.28 points.’
Psychologist Jay Van Bavel challenges this pushback suggesting that while that change might seem numerically small, it is substantial:
‘The Flynn effect is perhaps the most famous personality change. IQ grew a full standard deviation (14 points) in 66 years. Yet the change in conscientiousness is happening even faster. The blog [challenging the effect size] notes that it dropped .4 SD in a mere 7-8 years. The author claims this is a very small effect. Yet, If this trend continues, it will easily be larger than the Flynn effect--it's changing 3 to 4 times faster than IQ did. We need to put effect sizes in a broader context to understand them. These personality changes are actually very sizable by historical standards.’
I especially enjoyed the contribution of Professor Alex Haslam. Haslam looked at the questions in the Big Five survey that generate the conscientiousness score:
"I work hard to accomplish my goals"
"I am dependable and can be relied upon"
"I am willing to put in the effort to complete a task, even if it's difficult"
"I am able to resist temptations that would derail my progress"
"I believe that rules should be followed whenever possible"
His conclusion was that it was as likely that the changes reflected ‘widespread disenchantment with such things as rampant managerialism’. Work has just become so dull and bureaucratic that we struggle to be conscientious.
Overall I err on the side of feeling that John Burn Murdoch has revealed something that is of huge significance, and will have a major impact on how we build teams.
I took this conversation to the podcast, talking to Nick McClelland, the CEO of Byrne Dean, an agency that specialises in dealing with cultural issues inside organisations. One person describes Byrne Dean as the ‘best kept secret in the City’.
We talk about the research and what it means for work.
Listen: website / Apple / Spotify
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