Big Five guide
The Big Five personality traits at work
The Big Five are the five broad traits personality researchers use: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Each one is a range rather than a category, and most people sit somewhere near the middle. These guides cover what each trait looks like at work and how to write for it.
The five traits
One guide for each trait
Each guide covers what the trait looks like at work, how it shows up in writing, and how to adapt what you send.
Openness
- Higher
- Curious and imaginative, drawn to new ideas
- Lower
- Practical and grounded, prefers what is proven
Conscientiousness
- Higher
- Organized and thorough, plans ahead
- Lower
- Flexible and spontaneous, comfortable improvising
Extraversion
- Higher
- Outgoing and energized by people
- Lower
- Reserved and reflective, prefers smaller groups
Agreeableness
- Higher
- Warm, cooperative and considerate
- Lower
- Direct, skeptical and focused on the task
Emotional stability
- Higher
- Calm under pressure and slow to worry
- Lower
- Feels stress keenly and stays alert to risk
How to use them
Three habits that make these useful
Start with yourself
Take the free test and read your own five scores. The traits are much easier to recognize in other people once you have seen where you sit.
Take the free testRead for the conversation you are about to have
Before a call or a first email, open the guide for the trait that matters most in that conversation and take one or two things from it.
Know what you are comparing it with
If your team already uses DISC or Myers-Briggs, it helps to know what each one measures, what research backs it, and where each should stop.
Big Five vs DISC vs Myers-BriggsTreat it as a tendency, not a label
Estimates from writing describe what someone tends to prefer. They are often wrong about an individual, so they belong with a confidence level and a willingness to be corrected.
How the estimates workQuestions
About the Big Five
- What are the Big Five personality traits?
- Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability, which research more often measures from the other end, as neuroticism. Each is a continuous range rather than a category, and they came out of decades of work on how people describe themselves and each other (Goldberg, 1990; John and Srivastava, 1999).
- Why do researchers use traits rather than personality types?
- Types force people who differ by degree into separate boxes, so two people with nearly identical answers can land in different categories. Trait measures report where someone falls on each dimension instead, which is why they are the standard in personality research. Why traits rather than types.
- How do I find out my own Big Five scores?
- The free test on this site uses the Mini-IPIP, a 20-item public domain inventory published in 2006. It takes about three minutes, runs entirely in your browser and gives you a score on all five traits (Donnellan, Oswald, Baird and Lucas, 2006). Take the free test.
- Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216-1229.
- John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102-138). Guilford Press.
- Donnellan, M. B., Oswald, F. L., Baird, B. M., & Lucas, R. E. (2006). The Mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 192-203.
Read a person before you write to them
Tejesha estimates these five traits from public professional writing, so sales and recruiting teams can adapt the first message instead of guessing.