Heritage

Ways personality affects how long an employee stays with a company

Muriithi enjoyed hiring new staff. He treasured the chance to provide new people an opportunity to strengthen their careers all the while providing for their families.

Like most executives, he preferred to employ staff who would stay for many years rather than those who would quit too soon, thus wasting valuable on boarding time and resources.

Muriithi maintained a 52 per cent retention rate of employees at the five year point with his firm. Proud of his worker low turnover success, he endeavoured to improve it further and become a leader in his industry.

However, he noticed that certain staff with similar dispositions tended to stay longer or others with opposite dispositions stayed shorter.

He desired to know whether personality played a role in the length of time a staff stayed with his firm.

Social science researchers also ponder the multitude of factors that lead employees to leave organisations. The specific research that Muriithi should investigate involves intention to quit literature.

Researchers strive to empower executives to lower their employees’ intentions to quit. Lower intention to quit exists as positively correlated to greater commitment to an organisation and higher job performance.

The Journal of Management, read by every credible management professor in the world and which stands in the top 10 among all the thousands of research publications in the world, released in its February 2016 issue statistics that delineate the latest cutting edge research on the role of personality in staff turnover intentions.

Previously, research by five different social scientists that came out in 1991 highlighted the strong role of personality in impacting workplace behaviours.

Thereafter, researchers linked one’s personality to a whole range of workplace behaviours, including how one searches for a job and job satisfaction.

In 1993, researcher Michael Jenkins uncovered the link between various personality characteristics and one’s intention to quit a job. By 2008, Ryan Zimmerman uncovered that personality exists as a significant factor that influences actual employee quitting, not only turnover intentions.

So what should Muriithi be aware about in whether an employee stays or leaves?

Most of the literature focuses on the extent that positive or normal personality traits affect turnover.

Employees who demonstrate more agreeableness or consciousness stay with their employers longer than those who do not because they develop positive working relationships that help them perform better and receive more commendations.

Similarly, those who display kindness and hardworking traits remain with their current jobs due to their strong sense of obligation and allegiance to the people they work alongside and the organisation itself.

Therefore, many supervisors categorise employees with high levels of agreeableness, consciousness, kindness and hardworking traits as good employees.

However, another positive personality trait – openness to experiences – actually causes greater turnover in staff. Scientists reason that such individuals value the novelty of change and seek it out at the expense of their current workplaces. So, not all positive personality employees will stay long with Muriithi’s firm.

Now, in the Journal of Management, Sang Woo and his team from Purdue University in the US captivatingly delve deeper into the role of dark or negative personality aspects in order to predict ultimate workplace behaviour as it relates to voluntarily resigning and the speed at which such people quit.

Employees who hold negative emotions more frequently quit their jobs and espouse greater intentions to quit. Managers should notice the following warning signs: moving away, moving against, and moving towards.

Research from way back in 1950 conducted by Karen Horney and refined by Hogan and Hogan in 2001 and 2009 details these three kinds of negative personality traits.

“Moving away” psychological constructs include excessive scepticism, cautiousness and employees who are reserved, excitable and too leisurely.

“Moving against” incorporates boldness, mischievousness, imaginative and colourful traits.

Finally, “moving toward” involves diligent and dutiful traits. Each of the before mentioned traits in extremes can lead to personality disorders.

Sang Woo and colleagues ran regressions determining the likelihood of employees demonstrating such traits to stay with or leave their jobs. They found that negative personality traits usually predicted intentions to quit more accurately than positive traits.

Employees that demonstrate “moving against” traits leave organisations the fastest.

“Moving against” workers often engage in various deviant behaviours including falsifying documents, theft, absenteeism and policy violations.

So executives, be aware and look for employees who demonstrate personalities that fit with your objectives.

Share stories of how your co-workers’ dark personalities have hurt your workplace with other Business Daily readers through #KenyaJobs on Twitter.

Professor Scott serves as the director of the New Economy Venture Accelerator and chair of the Faculty Senate at USIUand may be reached on: [email protected] or @ScottProfessor .