Essay Ob

Student: Nguyen Khanh Huong
Roll Number: SB01017
Class: SB0705
INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT Topic: Identify and evaluate your personalities by using the Big Five Model (use a free online website). Write a paper providing your thoughts on the results and explain how the results can help you in personal and professional development.

1. Introduction Nowadays, as experts are studying further and further about personality, the importance of it in the society and workplaces is highly aware by everyone. The more we know about personalities, the better we can understand why people do the things they do, and how to communicate with them. Knowing about our own personalities, we can improve our styles, reduce stress and conflicts as well as develop positive attitudes in life (punctuality, flexibility, willingness to learn, friendliness…) Therefore, through this paper, I will examine deeply in my personalities as a particular example to further understand this matter. Moreover, with the focus on how it affects me in personal and professional development, I can find and improve myself to achieve the best success in my future.

2. Methodology
The basic concept of my assignment is the Big Five Personality Model. “Five basic dimensions underlie all other and encompass most of the variation in human personality” are: * Extraversion: one’s comfort level with relationships. Extraverts get their energy from interacting with others, while introverts get their energy from within themselves. Extraversion includes the traits of energetic, talkative, and assertive while introversion personalities are usually quiet, reserved and shy. * Agreeableness: the extent to which a person is good-natured, helpful, trusting, and cooperative. Traits include being kind, affectionate, cheerful and warm. * Conscientiousness: responsibilities and reliabilities. Conscientious people have self-discipline, well-organized, careful and responsible. * Openness to experiences: creative minds and willingness to learn. People with high level of openness tend to be imaginative, curious, independent and somehow artistic. * Emotional Stability: ability to deal with stress and other tense situations. A person who is very stable emotionally would remain calm in many situations and would feel secure.
Bases on this theory, with the help of an online website, I’ve got the result about my personalities according to Big Five Model. With this result, I will be able to evaluate and improve my career as well as my positive personalities.

3. Analysis results:
Results: http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9448/yourbigfiveresults.png
In my opinion, this result is matched 80% with my real personalities. In real life, I can be comfortable with people that I already knew before, especially classmates, parents, siblings… I can do silly things, say lots of random things, and joke freely. However, with strangers, I usually keep a secured distance, be formal and respective as much as possible. Sometimes, in disadvantaged circumstances, I might be shy and stay quiet all the time being with strangers as I don’t want strangers to know too much about myself. That’s why my result in Extroversion is a little above average score (59/100 respectively).
Consequently, this will help me find balance in group working, be opened and be quiet when needed. My job performance will be improved along with my social skills. Moreover, in competitive situations, especially facing with rivals, I can keep them from knowing about my strength and weakness; or pretend like I am not a dangerous rival for them.

Next, refer to Openness to Experience trait, because I really like original, conventional and unchangeable things so the low score (20/100) is reasonable. I don’t have a variety of interests but only a few one and do it thoroughly with my passion. However, sometimes the closeness in my mind prevents me from create new ideas and stay creative while brainstorming. But it’s true that I am a down-to-earth person as I really hate unclear, misleading, dishonest things/people.
I know this attitude sometimes has a bad effect on my career and my personal life since I am not willing to learn new things so my training performance will not be as good as I expect. If I am a leader, I might ignore helpful creative ideas from my teammates. My honest and straight personality also bring me hard times dealing with others although it’s a really worthy trait. However, I believe that the original is always the best basement for my every innovation. It helps me balance a group that contains many open-minded people and keep conventional values of life.

This conventional and honest personality might be one of the important reasons leads to my disagreeableness (22/100 of agreeableness). Because I am a little stubborn and hard to be persuaded, sometimes I find the dishonest people, the unclear things or the too-reliable-on-others person really uncomfortable and annoy me. Normally, I am quite kind and lovable; but whenever I am concentrating in doing something, I can easily be irritated by people who try to distract me. My perfection attitude also get me into quarrels as I always find the mistakes in others’ performances and try to fix it for them.
Nevertheless, as my friends and teammates stated, the perfectionist inside me really helps them a lot when they complete their tasks. I am easy to be angry and annoyed but it’s always reasonable and related to work issues or problems of the equity. So I think this is not a disadvantage but an advantage for my career and personal life.

Besides that, my flexibility in Emotional Stability helps me a lot in dealing with these two weaknesses. Despite easily being irritated by others, I can hold it in and balance my emotions really well. I made decision for tense situations really slowly and calmly. I don’t take it as a pressure or stress but only a problem like other problems everyone needs to face in life. One important reason for the low score is I am truly an optimist, seeing things with believe, happiness and hope. It’s not that I paint my life with pink, but my rational thinking always leads me to better things, not worsen the situations.
As a result, my stress level will be reduced a lot, prevent me from being overload with tasks, problems, personal matters… Because I know how to show my expressions and emotions at the right time, to the right person, my social relationships are really good, bring me benefits in both personal and professional life. I can tell that I have only one close best friend; but I have a lot of good friends who are ready to help me anytime I need, thanks to my emotional stability.

The last trait is conscientiousness with high score at 83/100. This indicates that I am a well-organized, disciplined and reliable person. I really hate disorganized things and people. I always try to arrange my stuff into a fixed positions and I hate when someone try to change it or make it messy. I usually make plans; review its process regularly and try to finish as perfect as possible. If I am assigned a task, I will try to do it thoroughly and not let anyone complain about my performance, or at least reach the bearable stage. This is applied with not only my personal events but also my working tasks and problems, especially tasks I have a lot of interests in like handicrafts, writing for magazines, reviewing things.
In my point of view, this is the most important trait among five traits. My great efforts and responsibilities will bring me more and more knowledge, then contribute to higher level of my job performance, as well as help me organize my life effectively. Not only those but people also trust me and respect me for my enthusiasm, concentration and reliability. Therefore, if I am a leader, I can easily affect and lead my teammates follow my decisions or instructions; also my position, status in the group will be firm and long lasted.

4. Conclusion & Lessons learned
To summarize, my personalities according to Big Five are quite correct and bearable. The five traits, no matter how high or low, have certain effects on our personal and professional development. It also indicates that everyone has their own personalities and no one is similar to another one. Although this is only a test and might not say everything about oneself, but based on those personalities, we can find the best solutions for our problems, the best way to live and the best career to take. Knowing about personalities, we can try to improve the good side and reduce or fix the bad side of our attitude to improve our living standard, job performance and satisfaction. Moreover, when dealing with relationships in society, we can have a wider view of one person, especially when being a leader joining in group works or assigning suitable tasks.

References:
Essentials of Organizational Behaviors, 10th Ed., Pearson (Chapter 2, p.41 – 44)
Big Five Test Website

References: Essentials of Organizational Behaviors, 10th Ed., Pearson (Chapter 2, p.41 – 44) Big Five Test Website