Positive and Negative Aspects of Each Personality

Personality test is becoming more and more popular in recruitment and selection process of companies and organization. This is due to the fact that it is personality rather than intelligence decides whether a person is suitable for a job or not. According to the Big Five, there is a five-factor model of personality, which includes five traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscien-tiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to experience. It is important to ignore the positive or negative associations that these words have in everyday language.

For example, Agreeableness is obviously take more advantage for achieving and main-taining popularity. Agreeable people are better liked than disagreeable people. On the other hand, agreeableness is not useful in situations that require tough or totally objective decisions. Disagreeable people can make excellent scientists, critics, or soldiers. However, none of the five traits is in themselves positive or negative, they are simply characteristics that individuals obsess to a greater or lesser extent.

In fact, every individual own all five aspects, yet, in different levels of each one. For example, two individuals could be described as ‘agreeable’ (agreeable people value getting along with others). But there could be significant variation in the degree to which they are both agreeable.

Each personality has positive and negative aspects which represent the highest and the lowest level on the scale.

The next part will discuss in detail positive and negative aspect of each personality.

1.Extraversion

Extraversion refers to the relationship between an individual to external world. People who have high score in Extraversion are called extroverts, they usually enjoy being with people, are full of energy and often experience positive emotion. They tend to be enthu-siastic, action oriented, individuals who are likely to say “Yes” or “Let’s go” to opportun-ities for excitement.

They prefer to belong to a group or team rather than being alone. In the opposite, individuals who have low score in Extraversion personality are called in-trovert. They lack of energy, excitement and desire in activities. Introverts are not neces-sarily interpreted as shyness or depression; they just simply need silence and prefer to be alone. The independence and reserve of the introvert is sometimes mistaken as unfriend-liness or arrogance.

2.Agreeableness

Agreeableness reflects individuals’ differences in ability in cooperation and social har-mony. People who gain high score as agreeable individuals value getting along with oth-ers. They are considered friendly, generous, helpful and willing to share their interests to other people. Agreeable people also usually have optimistic view with human nature. They believe the human is basically kind, honest and trustworthy.

On the other hand, disagreeable individuals tend to raise themselves’ interests above oth-ers. They do not concern much about getting along with other people and are unlikely to extend themselves. Consequently, disagreeable people are usually thought to be unfriend-ly, uncooperative and suspicious.

Agreeableness is obviously advantageous for attaining and maintaining popularity. Agreeable people are better liked than disagreeable people. On the other hand, agreeable-ness is not useful in situations that require tough or absolute objective decisions. Disa-greeable people can make excellent scientists, critics, or soldiers.

3.Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness reflects the way people control, regulate and direct their impulses (a sudden desire to do something without thinking about the results). Impulses are not total-ly bad because in daily life, there are lots of situations that need instant decide. Moreover, in times of play rather than work, acting spontaneously and impulsively can be fun. Im-pulsive individuals can be seen by others as colorful, fun-to-be-with, and a little bit crazy.

Nevertheless, acting in impulsive way can lead to trouble in numbers of ways. Impulses sometimes cause anti-social results such as crimes or retribution toward the perpetrator of such impulsive acts. Another problem with impulsive acts is that they often produce im-mediate rewards but undesirable, long-term consequences. For example, using drug (nar-cotic) for reducing pain may help for now yet will cause harmful addiction in the future.

The benefits of high conscientiousness are obvious. Conscientious individuals avoid trouble and achieve high levels of success through purposeful planning and persistence. They are also positively regarded by others as intelligent and reliable. On the negative side, they can be compulsive perfectionists and workaholics. Furthermore, extremely conscientious individuals might be regarded as stuffy and boring. Unconscientious people may be criticized for their unreliability, lack of ambition, and failure to stay within the lines, but they will experience many short-lived pleasures and they will never be called stuffy.

4.Neuroticism

Neurosis describes a condition of mental distress, emotional suffering and an inability to cope with the normal demand of life. Everyone shows some signs of neurosis, but we dif-fer in our degree of suffering and our specific symptoms of distress. Today neuroticism refers to the tendency to experience negative feelings.

Those who score high on Neuroticism may experience primarily one specific negative feeling such as anxiety, anger, or depression, but are likely to experience several of these emotions. People high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive. They respond emotionally to events that would not affect most people, and their reactions tend to be more intense than normal. They feel more threatened, disappointed, frustrated with situations that most of people feel normal. Those negative emotion tend to persist in unusually long period of time, which means they are often in bad moods and that avoid such individuals from thinking clearly, making right decision and cope effectively with stress.

People who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reac-tive. Those are usually be calm, emotionally stable and free from long-period negative feelings.

5.Openness to experience

Openness to Experience describes a dimension of cognitive style that distinguishes im-aginative, creative people from down-to-earth, conventional people. . Open people are in-tellectually curious, appreciative of art, and sensitive to beauty. They tend to be, com-pared to closed people, more aware of their feelings.

They tend to think and act in indivi-dualistic and nonconforming ways. Intellectuals typically score high on Openness to Ex-perience; consequently, this factor has also been called Culture or Intellect. Nonetheless, Intellect is probably best regarded as one aspect of openness to experience. Scores on Openness to Experience are only modestly related to years of education and scores on standard intelligent tests.

Another characteristic of the open cognitive style is a facility for thinking in symbols and abstractions far removed from concrete experience. This symbolic cognition may take the form of mathematical, logical, or geometric thinking, artistic and metaphorical use of language, music composition or performance, or one of the many visual or performing arts.

People with low scores on openness to experience tend to have narrow, common in-terests. They prefer the plain, straightforward, and obvious over the complex, ambiguous, and subtle. They may regard the arts and sciences with suspicion, regarding these endea-vors as abstruse or of no practical use. Closed people prefer familiarity over novelty; they are conservative and resistant to change.

Open and closed styles of thinking are useful in different environments. The intellectual style of the open person may serve a professor well, but research has shown that closed thinking is related to superior job performance in police work, sales, and a number of service occupations.

In conclusion, there are 5 traits of personality in each individual, the difference, however, is the degree of each personality in each person. There is no personality that is good or bad, but depends on situations that we can judge. Applying the Big Five traits, we can classify people base on their personality, which will help us to choose the most suitable works or missions for each one.