Exploiting Connections among Personality, Job Position, and Work Behavior: Evidence from Joint Bayesian Learning

Abstract

Personality has been considered as a driving factor for work engagement, which significantly affects people’s role performance at work. Although existing research has provided some intuitive understanding of the connection between personality traits and employees’ work behaviors, it still lacks effective quantitative tools for modeling personality traits, job position characteristics, and employee work behaviors simultaneously. To this end, in this article, we introduce a data-driven joint Bayesian learning approach, Joint-PJB, to discover explainable joint patterns from massive personality and job-position-related behavioral data. Specifically, Joint-PJB is designed with the knowledgeable guidance of the four-quadrant behavioral model, namely, DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness). Based on the real-world data collected from a high-tech company, Joint-PJB aims to highlight personality-job-behavior joint patterns from personality traits, job responsibilities, and work behaviors. The model can measure the matching degree between employees and their work behaviors given their personality and job position characteristics. We find a significant negative correlation between this matching degree and employee turnover intention. Moreover, we also showcase how the identified patterns can be utilized to support real-world talent management decisions. Both case studies and quantitative experiments verify the effectiveness of Joint-PJB for understanding people’s personality traits in different job contexts and their impact on work behaviors.