ABSTRACT

International Personality Items Pool (IPIP) or the Big Five Inventory (BFI) used a personality measure containing a broad factor called 'independence' which has an opposite pole labelled 'agreeableness'. The independence pole reflected the narrowband factors dominant, imaginative, self-sufficient, suspicious and experimenting. Those for the agreeableness pole were submissive, practical, group-oriented, trusting and conservative. The larger of the UK studies revealed that the typical manger scored below average for agreeableness against the general population. The SME study recorded a score just into the low average category; with the Anglo-US CEO study just below average against the more mainstream definition of agreeableness. Thus, in all cases, the average manager was clearly low on agreeableness. In 2014, one of the UK's leading personality test publishers reported that across all the Big Five dimensions, it was those organisations whose executives yielded the highest average agreeableness scores that had the best returns on investment and returns on assets.