Personality profiles of researchers and leaders

I describe myself as a researcher and a leader - naturally, I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a strong researcher or leader in the hopes that I can identify what I need to work on. I think it’s useful to talk about success in these roles as it relates to psychometric profiles, in particular with the 5-factor/OCEAN/the big 5 model of personality.

To recap, the 5 factors of personality are:

1. Openness to new experiences
2. Conscientiousness
3. Extraversion
4. Agreeableness
5. Neuroticism

Researcher

It’s quite easy to see how being a successful researcher that produces consistent good quality output requires one to have fairly high conscientiousness. I believe that although openness and conscientiousness are inversely correlated, people who score high on both could be particularly successful at research - the openness brings room for creative thinking and making connections between seemingly unrelated topics and the conscientiousness helps close the box that was opened and take things to completion. People high in openness and low in conscientiousness are able to produce fantastic ideas but don’t seem to be able to see things through before chasing a new dream. However, people low in openness and high in conscientiousness still do well because most of research is incremental in nature and even most highly productive researchers don’t necessarily have incredibly unique contributions. The other three factors don’t seem to influence research quality/productivity. I am fortunate to score high in openness and conscientiousness. What I’m working on is not leaving people behind as I run with my thoughts since I tend to assume that everyone else thinks like me.

Leader

The personality profile of a leader is very interesting. Low neuroticism and high conscientiousness are undeniably valuable for all leaders - those lower in neuroticism will stay cool, calm and collected under stress and those high in conscientiousness are better prepared, organized, goal orientated and prefer structure. When it comes to openness, leaders higher in openness are more likely to be strategic thinkers, which can be very useful but might present as more scatter-brained and indecisive. Similarly, those high in agreeableness build great teams and are well liked, but can struggle in getting results through others due to being hesitant in making unpopular decisions and resist dealing with conflict. Conversely, disagreeable people come off as untrustworthy and transactional (as opposed to transformational) because they tend to show skepticism of others’ motives. It isn’t clear to me how extraversion factors in. As I’ve mentioned, I score high in openness and conscientiousness, but also low in neuroticism and moderate in agreeableness. What I’m working on is flexing my agreeableness to be trustworthy and build great teams but also challenge others in a trusting manner and work through conflict to help get to the bottom of things and maximize growth.