The Effect of Personality Traits and Types on an Employees Readiness for Change

Abstract

Change Management is a highly tricky and often unsuccessful process. People are not afraid of the change itself but are more resistant to the effect that it will have on them. They fear what the consequences of change will be and subsequently they fear change. This paper is about the readiness for change, which is often said to be the core of change management itself. (Rick, 2011) It describes a model focusing on some of the personality traits of any individual, like Locus of control, general attitude towards change and the personality type and studies the impact and relation these personality traits and types have on the employees’ readiness or willingness to change. The goal of this article is twofold; to see whether factors in different people’s personality affect their readiness for change, hence resulting in different readiness for various individuals, and what organizations should do in this regard to successfully manage any change effort. Exploring the various relationships between the selected personality traits and the readiness for change, by taking a diverse sample from various organizations in Islamabad, and using a questionnaire survey, which was distributed via email, social networking and in person (paper and pencil) the data collected was analyzed by the data analysis software SPSS 16 and as such various tests were run on the six formulated hypotheses. The results of this study are congruent with the reviewed literature. Personality traits as a whole have seen to have a significant relationship with an employee’s readiness for changes as does Personality type A employees. Personality Type B on the other hand was not seen to have any significant relation, even though this does indicate that no relationship is present. The limitations of this study mainly the geographic limitations, as well as the sample size constitute the study to be not that highly generalizable, but this study does add to the minimal existing literature on employee readiness and personality in developing nations. The contextual factors are also excluded which delimit the study. It is recommended based on findings of this study and previous literature that companies should put more focus on personality traits and types for successful change management, especially those companies which have change in their agendas.