The Impact of Big Five Personality Traits on the Salience of Project Employees from the Perspective of Project Managers

Abstract

Stakeholders of any organization play a key role in the firm’s success. When they are left unmanaged, the organization may have to bear negative consequences. Therefore, managers need guidelines for identification and prioritization of the stakeholders. The Stakeholders’ Salience Theory is considered to be a major contribution in the scientific research because it studied stakeholders as a group. Although, it gained a lot of attention among the researchers, there was still a need to consider individual related factors in which their behavior and personalities would be studied. All the stakeholders working under a managers are not equally salient to them, therefore, a different scholarly treatment is needed to identify which personality factors make those stakeholders significant from the managers’ perspective. The model chosen to assess the personality traits was big five model which included 5 personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The five personality traits were chosen as independent variables whereas the salience of the project employees was chosen as dependent variable. For data collection different stakeholders-more specifically project employees- working in different projects under education sector were assessed via big five model personality survey and against each employee, their project managers rated them according to the salience they gave them. As a result, it was concluded that four of the five personality traits i.e. extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness had positive effect on the salience of the project employees, whereas, only one personality trait i.e. neuroticism had a negative effect on the salience of the project employees. Although, openness had a positive impact on the salience of project employees, but it had a weak significance subjecting to the consideration of the contextual factors. The hypotheses formulated in this study, all were supported by previous studies