If you’re worried your bad workplace is making you a worse person, you may be right. Researchers from the University of Illinois recently introduced a new model examining how chronic workplace stress can fundamentally change people’s personalities — and predictably, it isn’t for the better.
According to the researchers, previous studies on workplace behaviour largely operated on the premise that personalities are fixed. Hire someone kind, they’ll make the workplace kinder. Hire a jerk, they’ll bring jerk energy to the role. It’s all fairly logical.
However, in a new paper published in Journal of Management, organisational researchers Jarvis Smallfield and Donald H. Kluemper consider that workplace stress can actually alter people’s personalities in both the short and long term. This impact is examined through the Big Five model of personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extroversion. Read more…
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