Personality is from Mars, values are from Venus: an exploratory study of the relationship between the personality of executives and their values

Higgs, M. and Litchenstein, S. (2007) Personality is from Mars, values are from Venus: an exploratory study of the relationship between the personality of executives and their values (Henley Working Paper Series, HWP 0713), Reading, UK. University of Reading

Abstract

The psychology literature in general treats personality as being separate from personal values (e.g. Robertson and Callinan, 1998). The strategic leadership literature, however, bundles values and personality together as subsets of ‘psychological characteristics’ that make up an executive’s ‘orientation’ (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996). Recent leadership research (e.g. Washington et al., 2006) treats the roles of values and personality interchangeably and indicate they both affect types of leadership equally.
What is the reality? The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there is a relationship between personal values and personality in a management context.
The current research tests the proposition that there will be a clear relationship between individual personality traits and individual values based on the five-factor model of personality (McCrae and Costa, 1996) and values individually and categorised by the Maslovian (1970) motivational groups of Sustenance Driven, Outer Directed and Inner Directed.
Data was collected from 103 in-work MBA managers. Empirical investigation involved the use of correlational analyses. These showed no significant relationships between the personal value systems of managers and the five-factor model of personality. Some correlations were found between personality traits and individual values. However, these were weak and lacked practical significance. These findings provide some support for the argument that values and personality factors are independent constructs, particularly at the level of value systems.
This study extends our understanding of the psychological attributes of managers and the basis of executive action. The findings support Robertson and Callinan’s (1998) view that personality is separate from personal values and contradicts previous studies (e.g. Caprara et al, 2006) that found a relationship between a number of individual values and personality factors. Implications for researchers and practitioners in organisational behaviour arenas and strategic leadership are discussed, including the need for clarity and a renewed emphasis on executive values in research and executive selection. Limitations of the study are indicated and the need identified for future research to explore ways in which personality factors and values may be studied in order to gain more insight into leaders’ personal orientation.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: M. Higgs

Download statistics