Analysis Of Changes In The Five-Factor Model Personality Traits
The most significant changes among personality traits are those of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Despite earlier suggestions for reduction in conscientiousness and increase in neuroticism, research findings failed to reflect this. Instead, the two personality traits depended on the number of years unemployed. The lack of changes in neuroticism was unexpected since unemployment causes unsettling and stress promoting a situation that contributes to loneliness and low self-esteem. This may be because of an inadequate neuroticism scale or the alleviation of certain difficulties unique to the workplace. Gender differences are observed in all three personality traits that showed significant change.
Agreeableness increases in the first 2 years among unemployed men then in the last two years of the study period to a level lower than their employed counterparts. In women, agreeableness largely reduces with more years spent in unemployment. In early unemployment stages, individuals may behave agreeably so as to secure another job or placate those around them, but in later years these efforts may weaken. Such tendencies may differ by gender according to traditional work roles. The more years men spend in unemployment, the more their levels of conscientiousness decrease. For women, conscientiousness increases in early and late unemployment but reduces in between. The regains may be attributed to greater ease to pursue non-work-related activities in line with traditional gender roles such as caregiving.
Openness in men is stable within the first year unemployment but with more years, their levels decrease. Women have sharp reductions in openness within the second and third year of unemployment but this increases within the fourth year. Since the degree of reduction by gender varied according to years spent unemployed this may reflect gender differences in coping strategies. Apart from agreeableness in employed men, both men and women in employment have fairly stable personality traits throughout the study period with results showing small changes. This may be attributed to the typical personality development process occurring across the life-span or because of socioeconomic factors that influence everyone. The increase in openness is supported by Anger, Camehl and Peter (2017) who found that there was an increase in openness for the average displaced worker attributed to highly educated workers and direct job-to-job transitions.
Similarly to Boyce et al. (2015), involuntary job loss does not affect the other dimensions of the Big Five inventory. The study results indicated that personality change took place in individuals who were re-employed by the second time point after having gone through unemployment compared to those who employed throughout the study period. It is also important to note that the initial suggestion that personality change endures following reemployment revealed contrary results showed personality rebounds upon re-employment.
An important avenue for future research is the provision of opportunities for scholars to focus greater theoretical attention on unemployment and personality change specifically. The benefit of this is that greater exploration into personality change will provide impactful later-life intervention strategies that will help mitigate possible harmful effects of various labor market events and promote adaptive coping in occupational settings. Specific traits found conducive for a functional workplace will be critical in the initiation of accompanying policies.
Our results, therefore, suggest that personality has the ability to undergo important and meaningful change. These findings are aimed at informing policy debate over how best to help individuals and nations improve their well-being. The authors recommend that future researchers to successfully separate true change from measurement error by engaging in more time period of personality assessment. This is aimed at overcoming the aforementioned limitations as a result of having personality assessment at only two time-points.
