{"id":12638,"date":"2013-05-07T10:49:25","date_gmt":"2013-05-07T14:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=12638"},"modified":"2013-05-07T02:13:28","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T06:13:28","slug":"study-suggests-strong-personalities-are-weak-when-faced-with-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2013\/05\/study-suggests-strong-personalities-are-weak-when-faced-with-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Study suggests strong personalities are weak when faced with change"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the BI Norwegian Business School <\/span>press release via AlphaGalileo:<\/p>\n

\"strategyManagement teams with members who have strong personality traits have difficulty adapting to rapid changes in their surroundings<\/strong>, according to new study.<\/p>\n

Companies and organisations must be able to adapt to sudden changes in their surroundings.<\/p>\n

There are many examples of organisations that no longer exist because they did not manage to adapt quickly enough<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This requires managers and management teams that can implement necessary changes.<\/p>\n

Talent and vulnerability<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Associate Professor Jan Ketil Arnulf at BI Norwegian Business School has conducted a study of how managers with strong personality traits influence a management team\u2019s ability to quickly adapt to changes in their surroundings.<\/p>\n

Members of management teams will have different types of personality traits and some managers will have stronger personality traits than others<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, personality traits can be explained as talent \u2013 something one is good at. It is a marked and strong trait.<\/p>\n

Strong personality traits can also reflect vulnerability or more specifically behaviour in which one is stuck.<\/p>\n

For example, extroverted persons have difficulty being quiet and introverted persons can have difficulty keeping a conversation going.<\/p>\n

Followed management teams for three years<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Arnulf was admitted to a marketing company where he followed ten different management teams with a total of 60 managers over a period of three years. The managers had the same tasks and areas of responsibility related to sales, costs and profitability.<\/p>\n

The management researcher used a well-known and frequently employed personality test \u2013 Cattell\u2019s 16PF5 \u2013 which tests 16 vital personality traits and intelligence<\/strong>: Warmth, reasoning (intelligence), emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism and perceived tension.<\/p>\n

The 60 managers were tested to find the ten management group\u2019s most marked personality traits.<\/p>\n

The scores from the personality tests were compared on a monthly basis with the financial results over a period of three years, a total of 33 measurements.<\/p>\n

Strong traits make for inflexible habits<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The strongest personality traits in all the teams proved to be more inflexible ways of doing business.<\/p>\n

This became a significant problem for the management teams during the three-year period. Major changes in the market necessitated changes in order to succeed.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeams that had markedly strong personality traits were more inflexible than teams with less markedly strong traits<\/strong>\u201d, Jan Ketil Arnulf points out.<\/p>\n

The teams with the strongest personality traits were less apt to adapt to changes in the market.<\/p>\n

This applied to all the personality traits studied with two exceptions: intelligence and stress robustness.<\/p>\n

Management teams with members who had a high level of intelligence and a well-developed ability to withstand stress achieved better profitability<\/strong> than management teams where these personality traits were not as dominant.<\/p>\n

Advice to organisations<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The study shows that the members\u2019 personality traits can influence how the management team solves its tasks.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonality traits most likely function the strongest if people are not aware of them\u201d, Arnulf points out.<\/p>\n

He believes teamwork training and enhanced awareness of how individuals function in a team will make a management team more flexible<\/strong> in their job and less vulnerable to habits and inflexible behaviour.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.bi.edu\/bizreview\/articles\/strong-personalities-are-weak-when-faced-with-change\/<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the BI Norwegian Business School press release via AlphaGalileo: Management teams with members who have strong personality traits have difficulty adapting to rapid changes in their surroundings, according to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[59,58,143,32,12,218,102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12638"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12834,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12638\/revisions\/12834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}