Diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to organizations and leaders today more than ever. While gender diversity and inclusion are a specific focus area for many organisations and researchers, little work has been done with respect to alternative gender and sexualities. We undertook an investigation of personality differences in LGBTQ+ managers and are glad to report some of our findings.

The table below presents the effect size or mean differences for 8 personality factors from SPS-MAX in a sample of 192 employees who identified themselves as LGBTQ+. All comparisons were made with the India National Norm of over 998 sample size.

You will notice that while there are many important statistically significant differences, none of them are large differences from a practical standpoint. However, there were interesting patterns when we broke this data point between individuals who are completely out, selectively out and completely closeted. 

We also looked at Adaptive Styles from SPS Max. The differences in means as a function of pooled standard deviation are provided below.

Conclusions

The effect sizes between straight and cis-gender employees vs LGBTQ+ employees indicate that LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to use composure as a means to adapt. There are definite benefits to LGBTQ+ employees due to this adaptive style, e.g. getting along with others, being patient with others, being measured in interpersonal communication and ability to navigate difficult interpersonal situations without dominating over others. They may also impact LGBTQ+ individuals adversely, e.g. inability to speak up against discrimination, being polite even when display of temper may be warranted and lacking assertiveness especially in conflict or negotiations. On other personality factors there were no big differences. Personality differences are smaller than overall individual differences. 

Within the LGBTQ+ community, we see small but critical differences depending on their status with respect to a socialized identity i.e. whether they are out or not.  We find that LGBTQ+ employees who are completely out to their colleagues report being more Compassionate, Open and Creative. Completely out employees feel more Social-agency than those who are selectively out. We hypothesize that being less out is likely to make one acutely aware of their out status which may lead to feeling less in control and confident in social settings. More qualitative research may be warranted with this group. With respect to the adaptive styles we found that completely out individuals favored Composure and Calmness as key means to adapt to adverse situations. As expected, we found completely closeted employees scoring low on all adaptive styles. This may indicate a clear adaptive benefit for being completely out in the workplace. Key questions that interest us are - how do completely closeted individuals adapt? Is there a lack of adaptive competence or is it about an absence of a clear style? Is there a lack of general awareness of the adaptive styles in case of closeted individuals?

                                            From Big Five standpoint Antagonism is a complex mish mash of traits. It is largely concerned with low agreeableness, high neuroticism and often low emotionality. Individuals prone to Antagonism often have trouble getting along with people and while they can survive most interpersonal transactions, it is difficult for others to cope with them in interpersonal situations. Chances are many individuals with Antagonism proneness may not be aware of how rude or callous they come across to others. This is tricky because Antagonism prone individuals are often scary to give feedback to. When in position of power, people adapt to Antagonism prone individuals by treading carefully around them, not getting involved into arguments with them and in general assuming a meek stance when interacting with them. This often wins them a 'toxic' adjective. 

Antagonism within the purview of  SPS Scan is based on 6 key commonly overlapping challenges:

Success of human beings as a species ought to be due to higher cognitive functions, social bonding and the ability to be open to new solutions. From an evolutionary standpoint, close-mindedness should not be a matter of individual difference unless nature allowed it to be propagated for certain benefits. Close-mindedness offers certain evolutionary benefits which can be many and in the tradition of evolutionary psychology, we can only guess them. But the discourse leads to important insights into workplace behaviours.

In this article, we discuss close-mindedness and what the SPS research tells us about it. We define close-mindedness as a tendency to prefer established ways of thinking and doing things over looking for, acknowledging and utilising new information in intrapersonal and interpersonal decision-making. Close-mindedness is not just the opposite of open-mindedness and it is important to distinguish. It is easy to consider it a bipolar opposite of openness factor from the Big 5. It is a more complex construct and an important one given how much it impacts social interactions - something that is usually more linked to agreeableness and extraversion factors.

We  asked 247 individuals attending selection interviews who took SPS Scan to rank order what they consider their common workplace challenges. The adjective inventory uses undesirable adjectives mapped to all of the big five factors (from the SPS Scan original item bank) and Likert statements from SPS Scan. All respondents were forced to choose at least 1 and upto 4 from a block of 8 negative phrases (standard SPS Scan format). We looked at individuals who self-reported close-mindedness as a descriptor for themselves and compared them with the Likert statement responses. We report below the top 5 items with highest differences of practical and statistical significance (p<0.01).

We all can agree that no hiring manager or recruiter would hire a new employee only to set them up to fail. Yet, new hires do fail and often in spite of remedial strategies. A common reason for this is that often role requirements are not clear and at other times there is too much focus on skills that can be acquired with time. What many hiring managers fail to recognise is that there are some fundamental tendencies that are hard to fix or acquired due to sheer individuality of people.

Antagonism is a common cause for non-performance in roles requiring social mediation, customer service, account management, teaching/training, helping and care-giving. Antagonism has strong negative relationships with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

Detachment is a common caruse for non-performance into roles requiring frequent social interaction, information sharing, initiating contacts, speaking publicly and asserting self over others. Detachment has strong negative relationships with Extraversion and Emotional stability.

Inhibition is a common cause of non-performance in roles requiring responsiveness, being busy, doing a large volume of work, stressful timelines and energy/endurance. Inhibition has strong negative relationship with Emotional Stability, moderate positive relationship with conscientiousness and moderate negative relationship with Extraversion.

Disinhibition is a common cause for non-performance in roles requiring high stakes risk, procedural action, bigger responsibilities and work which may undergo legal/regulatory scrutiny. Disinhibition has a strong negative relationship with Conscientiousness and moderate positive relationship with Extraversion and Openness.

Incomprehension is a common cause for non-performance in roles requiring sound judgement, analytical thinking, complex problem solving, dealing with novelty, dealing with ambiguity and decision-making with long term consequences. Incomprehension has strong negative relationship with Openness and Emotional stability.

Personality is a good predictor of job performance. Leadership requires different behaviours at different instances. The ability to exercise one's traits is a mark of good leadership. However, a great deal of research has proven that conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to idea are all good predictors of leadership emergence. Extraversion and agreeableness have mixed results. Surprisingly, agreeableness has been found to have negative correlations with leadership emergence and positive correlations with effectiveness.

Handling Stress

The simplest answer is both yes and no.

I wish I had a penny for every time a manager told me “I do hear them out”. Hearing rarely amounts to understanding. Add a little empathy to hearing and you have listening as the product. Listening provides the rich perspective leaders need. The smallest of cues and the subtlest of hints that enable them to know the true picture. Leaders also need to deal with all kinds of knowledge to be able to make decisions. Specialised knowledge from multiple streams may not always be available with the leaders. Listening in this manner, helps them to learn and improvise. Leaders that know what they are doing and seek opinions only to be liked, do more harm than good. The frequent problem here is the fact that most leaders who are not good at listening, are blind to this weakness.

Performance favouritism