I was reading Richard Florida’s latest book Who’s Your City? and really liked the chapter on how the Big Five personality types (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) cluster geographically by region and in doing so, create geographic personality-scapes that one should be aware of when choosing a place to live. In other words, if you are a high Agreeable you will eventually feel out of place in a high Neuroticism place. Florida does not say that nice people shouldn’t move to New York, but that is what he means.
The “Big Five” types have been proven through extensive research and testing to be highly accurate descriptors of human personality. Florida says cities have personalities too….that stem from their economic structures and inform and constrain their futures.
So, I asked myself, as someone who thinks about how organizational values and culture drive brand, do organizations have personalities too? And I don’t mean the Aacker-style brand personality profiles that all seem to run together into the same words over and over. Everyone seems to be Innovative, Caring, Bold, Assertive, Rugged. I mean deeper personalities that determine what the organization can and cannot do well. And do these personalities also stem from the organization’s economic structures and inform and constrain their futures (brands) as with cities?
Certainly there is a vast body of work on how personality type, be it measured on The Big Five, Myers Briggs, DISC or others, predicts individual behaviour, career choice, success and so on. Different types clearly gravitate to different occupational groups and occupational groups cluster by industry and company. Actuaries would be high Conscientious and insurance companies would have a lot of actuaries, but does that mean that insurance companies will never have the high Openness and Extroversion to make them innovative and market focused? Since the dawn of time insurance companies really have not tended to be particularly innovative or market focused. This question feels important to me since understanding organizational DNA is a central part of my process of seeing brand positioning opportunities.
There has been interesting work done to understand if people try to re-make organizations in their own image - Individual Personality And Organizational Culture Or “Let’s Change This Place So I Feel More Comfortable” Gerald L. Barkdoll, describes the motives and the processes that people go through to make organizations feel more like them. But what is the personality they are trying to change?
Along come the personality testers. Whether it’s 16-Types or Companies are People Too, there are profiling techniques to slot organizations using survey questionnaires of individuals. Must be very interesting to go through this and I would love to hear from anyone who has done this in their organization.
But is there a more deeply coded personality in the culture of an organization that transcends individuals, leaders of the day or programmatic change management? And does it correspond to the Big Five?
Perhaps I’ll start to think about how the organizations I work with rate on the Big Five and see if I can detect patterns. Anyone who is interested in pursuing this in a research exercise, please let me know.
