A study published in March 2023 in Frontiers in Psychology by Wendy Kang, Kristina L. Guzman, and Antonio Malvaso set out to answer a question most organizations have tried to crack through gut feel and anecdotal observation for decades: are there measurable personality differences between people who rise to leadership and those who do not? The study, titled “Big Five Personality Traits in the Workplace: Investigating Personality Differences Between Employees, Supervisors, Managers, and Entrepreneurs,” analyzed data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, drawing on 2,415 entrepreneurs, 3,822 managers, 2,446 supervisors, and 10,897 employees. What the researchers found was not a dramatic new discovery but a formal confirmation, with real numbers behind it, of something that leaders and talent professionals have long sensed without being able to clearly name. The findings sit in a journal most executives will never open, but what they reveal belongs on every boardroom table.
The research uses the Big Five personality framework, sometimes called OCEAN, which organizes human personality into five dimensions: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These are not soft labels from a personality quiz. The Big Five emerged from decades of psychometric work and remains the most empirically validated personality framework in organizational psychology (Journal of Applied Psychology). These traits are measurable, relatively stable across adulthood, and have been repeatedly linked to how people perform at work, how they lead, and how far they advance. The Kang, Guzman, and Malvaso study is particularly useful because it does not just ask whether traits matter in general, but whether distinct personality profiles cluster at different levels of the organizational hierarchy, which is a far more actionable question for anyone involved in hiring, developing, or promoting people.
The Trait That Showed Up Everywhere
Among all the findings, one result stands out for its consistency across every level of the organizational ladder. Conscientiousness, which the researchers describe as a person’s capacity to control impulses, set long-term goals, and persistently work toward them, was significantly higher among entrepreneurs, managers, and supervisors than among regular employees. Across the 19,580 participants in the dataset, those in roles carrying responsibility, oversight, or strategic ownership consistently scored higher on this trait than those who did not. Conscientiousness is the internal scaffolding that makes ambition actionable. It is what separates the person who has ideas from the person who follows through on them, and the research is saying plainly that organizations tend to be led by people who have more of it.
This is consistent with what earlier research has also found. A meta-analysis by Hough and Oswald, cited in the Kang study, established Conscientiousness as the strongest single personality predictor of managerial performance across professional settings (Journal of Applied Psychology). A separate meta-analysis by Collins and colleagues found that individuals who pursue entrepreneurial careers score significantly higher on achievement motivation, one of the core components of Conscientiousness as a trait. What the Kang study adds is a sharper lens, comparing four distinct occupational groups within the same population sample. For anyone in talent development or succession planning, the read is direct: the people most likely to grow into leadership are often already showing the behavioral fingerprints of high Conscientiousness, not in their credentials, but in how they work.
Where The Traits Diverge
The picture gets more nuanced when looking at the other four traits. Extraversion was higher among managers and supervisors than among regular employees, which fits the expectation that leadership demands communication, persuasion, and a willingness to be visible. More interesting is what the data shows about entrepreneurs, who did not score significantly higher on Extraversion than managers, challenging the popular image of the boldly outgoing founder. What separates the entrepreneur from the manager may not be social dominance but orientation toward personal achievement and ownership over outcomes, both of which trace back to Conscientiousness rather than Extraversion.
Openness to Experience, which reflects curiosity, creativity, and comfort with ambiguity, followed a more layered pattern. Entrepreneurs scored higher on this trait than employees, which makes sense given that building something new requires tolerance for uncertainty. Managers, however, did not show meaningfully higher Openness than employees, raising a tension worth noting: the people most likely to be promoted into management may not be the most creative thinkers in the room. They may simply be the most dependable and goal-driven. Organizations that equate promotion readiness with creative potential may, without realizing it, be selecting for something else entirely, and the research gives that gap a name.
The Trait That Works Against You
Neuroticism is where the findings are most unambiguous. Higher Neuroticism scores were consistently associated with lower occupational standing across the data. Those in leadership roles, whether managers, supervisors, or entrepreneurs, showed significantly lower Neuroticism than the general employee population. Neuroticism in this framework is not a clinical label. It refers to a tendency toward emotional instability, anxiety, and reactivity under stress, which in the workplace shows up as difficulty managing uncertainty, impulsive responses under pressure, and reduced capacity to sustain performance when conditions get difficult. None of these are assets in a role that requires others to trust your judgment and follow your lead.
A broader systematic review published in the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2025, synthesizing 81 peer-reviewed studies on personality and workplace performance, found the same persistent pattern: Neuroticism was negatively correlated with performance outcomes across organizational contexts (Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship). The implication is not that emotionally sensitive people cannot succeed. It is that unmanaged reactivity creates measurable friction in performance, and organizations that invest in helping people develop emotional regulation are building a workforce whose trait profile more closely resembles that of the people who lead it.
What This Means For The People Who Make The Decisions
The most direct takeaway from this study is that personality is not a soft background factor in talent decisions. It is one of the most structurally significant predictors of how performance and progression unfold. Organizations have long relied on experience, credentials, and technical skill as the primary proxies for potential, but the research shows that personality traits, particularly Conscientiousness and emotional stability, are among the strongest signals of who will perform well and who will grow into leadership. A hiring process that evaluates what a candidate knows without understanding how they are built psychologically is working with an incomplete picture.
The practical implication is not to swap resumes for personality tests, but to build a more complete evaluation framework. Validated Big Five instruments can add meaningful signal alongside traditional assessment, especially for roles requiring sustained performance, leadership responsibility, and cross-functional collaboration. For development, knowing where employees fall on Conscientiousness and Neuroticism helps managers direct the right kind of support. A high-potential employee with elevated Neuroticism may not need more skills training. They may need clearer feedback structures, more psychological safety, and better pressure management, which is a fundamentally different investment, and the research makes a case for why it matters.
For senior leaders, the sharpest implication may be about organizational culture as a selection mechanism. If Conscientiousness is the trait most consistently found among people who rise to leadership, then cultures that reward disciplined follow-through, goal commitment, and accountability are quietly selecting for that profile over time. Culture is not just a set of stated values. It is also a filter, and most organizations have never formally examined what personality dimensions their environment naturally attracts, promotes, and retains, and which ones it gradually pushes out.
What The Research Leaves Open
The study is careful not to claim that personality determines destiny. The data shows systematic differences in trait profiles across occupational groups, but it does not settle whether high Conscientiousness causes career advancement or whether the demands of leadership roles shape the trait over time. This distinction matters enormously for how organizations invest in people. If traits are largely fixed by adulthood, the strategic priority is fit and selection. If they shift meaningfully with environment and experience, the case for culture, coaching, and sustained development becomes considerably stronger.
There are also contextual limits the study does not fully address. The dataset is from the United Kingdom, and personality research has long shown that cultural context shapes how traits are expressed and valued. Whether the same profiles predict advancement with equal force across industries, geographies, and organizational types remains an open question. What the study does leave on the table is a challenge to the assumption that success in organizations is primarily a function of knowledge, effort, and circumstance. The evidence points to something more persistent, a set of dispositions that shape how people show up, how long they sustain their effort, and how others experience working with them. Whether those dispositions are born, built, or both is still being worked out. But that they exist, that they differ systematically across organizational levels, and that they matter as much as the data says they do, that part is no longer open to debate.