PL-Analyser – A PERSONALITY TRAITS AND LEADERSHIP STYLES ANALYSIS SYSTEM

Abstract

A pleasant personality and the ability to lead are important factors that companies consider in hiring workers. In the current highly competitive environment, companies are taking measures to ensure that the people they hire possess leadership qualities and have good work attitude. This is evident from the type of recruitment tests and interviews conducted. Many European employers have been known to conduct personality tests on potential hires to ensure that they hire only team players. This project aims to develop a system known as PL-Analyser that provides a solution to aid companies to identify the right person to perform the right job based on personality traits and leadership styles. The system also aims to help graduates to understand their personality traits, and recommends career possibilities that match their personality traits. The system was developed based on the Big Five personality traits theory, a theory that was derived from Carl Jung, John Holland’s Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional (RIASEC) Code of career possibilities and the Situational Leadership theory by Hersey and Blanchard. PL-Analyser is a web-based system. The user interface and business tiers were developed based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2003 and the data is stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. After system development and testing, the functions of the PLAnalyser system were tested by 30 users, who were randomly selected from a pool of working professionals. The PL-Analyser system was then hosted in an independent web hosting facility at URL of http://pl-analyser.fsktm.um.edu.my. The system was opened to users to participate in the study from June 2006 to May 2007. A total of 216 survey responses were gathered. Fifty (50) out of the total survey responses were gathered using paper-based survey forms. Only 148 (69%) participants expressed their opinions on the accuracy of the survey results. ii Based on the data collected, 136 out of 148 (92%) participants commented that the Big Five personality traits theory correctly represents their personality traits and 124 out of 148 (84%) participants are of the view that Heysey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership theory correctly represents their leadership styles. A total of 104 (70%) participants agree that the career options derived using John Holland’s RIASEC code theory, based on the personality traits of participants, correctly describes their career options at between 60%-70%. The analysis performed on the personality traits of both the working group and non-working group participants found that male participants have Adjustment as their dominant trait and female participants have Conscientious as their dominant trait. Analysis found that no correlation between the five personality trait dimensions and the RIASEC career codes. Further analysis to determine the relationship between the ambitions of the participants and their career codes shows that only 12 (41%) out of 29 participants are found to have ambitions that matched their Category 1 RIASEC code, which they are most associated with. The analysis on the leadership styles of the working group and non-working group shows that 165 (97%) participants in the working group and 44 (96%) participants in the non-working group are task-oriented. These outcomes reflect a big difference with the number of people-oriented participants, considering that there were only 5 (3%) participants and 2 (4%) participants from the working and non-working groups, respectively. Data analysis also shows that female working group participants (71%) are better leaders then their male counterparts (67%) within the medium range of overall leadership performance measurement. In the non-working group, participants of both genders exhibit similar medium level leadership performance.