The Big Five Personality Traits - Term Paper Example

The five dimensions that constitute the framework symbolize the fundamental personality traits which are considered crucial in the process of assessing the individual’s behavior in the organizations. The five traits are agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, extraversion and openness. The essay endeavors to present a clear description of one of the five personality traits i.e. Agreeableness. It also provides a clear depiction about how the mentioned trait applies to me. Agreeableness Agreeableness, in the language of Gregory Moorhead and Ricky W.

Griffin, is referred to an individual’s capability of getting along with other people (Griffin & Moorhead, 2011). It also refers to the degree to which an individual is helpful and trusting or uncooperative and suspicious (Ewen, 2003). Agreeableness makes some people cooperative, gentle, understanding, forgiving, and good-natured. People who are lacking this trait are found to be short tempered, irritable and uncooperative. They become antagonistic toward others. Researchers have not been able to investigate this trait completely.

In other words there are several aspects that are related to this trait are likely to undergo research in the coming days. However, researchers have already observed that people who are full of agreeableness are good at making effective relationships with their colleagues, managers and sub-ordinates. On the contrary, individuals who lack this particular trait struggle to make effective working relationships (Griffin & Moorhead, 2011). Researchers expect that similar trend may be found in case of relationships with customers, suppliers and various other entities who are involved in business activities.

According to Charles Donald Spielberger, “agreeableness describes a broad, but related, set of individual differences in how a person relates to others” (Spielberger, 2004). Precisely, it describes the differences in being mostly self-oriented or anti-social versus other-oriented or pro-social. ‘Positive traits’ that are associated with the agreeableness are warmness, kindness, cooperativeness, politeness, flexibility, considerateness, generousness etc. On the other side, the negative traits which are related to agreeableness are unkindness, selfishness, stubbornness, distrustfulness etc.

(Spielberger, 2004). According to Adrian Furnham and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, agreeableness is one of those traits that are least associated with ‘ability’ (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005). Kyllonen’s article as well as Heggestad and Ackerman’s article unveiled that there is positive but non-significant and modest correlations between agreeableness and ‘ability measures’. Their studies confirm the fact that agreeableness is theoretically independent from intellectual competence (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005).

Tobin and Graziano argue that agreeableness is perhaps the least understood dimension among all the Big Five (Mondak, 2010). According to Jeffery J. Mondak, “data on agreeableness seem likely to be jeopardized by social desirability effects.” (Mondak, 2010). Most probable reason behind such statement is the fact that most of the people are not likely to consider themselves as unkind, cold and uncooperative. Researches reveal that there is interesting but limited array of effects of agreeableness in the workplaces.

Jensen-Campbell et al. (2002) have opined that agreeableness is a crucial predictor in case of adolescents and children in the context of ‘