Personality was Yesterday – Identity is Today

By Priya E. Abraham

​Simultaneous socio-economic, technological, and cultural shifts are the current work context. Leaders of change have been looking for hands-on solutions to master these challenges. The diversity of customers, markets, solutions, and talent – all around us – requires an appropriate approach towards people and organisation development to reflect the fast dynamics of these simultaneous shifts. 

Shaping the 'future of work'

Personality-based approaches, commonly accepted in people and organisation development over the last few decades, need updating. To master the challenges of the future of work, for example, shifting from the traditional functional hierarchy to a “network of teams”, leaders are required to consider innovative approaches that allow talent to recognise their full potential to build an engaged, motivated and accountable workforce.

​In brief, we need to change the paradigm in people and organisation development – We need to move from personality to identity. The key differences between identity and personality are:

Personality does not indicate the interaction between individuals, teams, and organisations. Despite the focus on interaction in the diversity age, personality-based tools such as MBTI™ are still widely in use. Equally, most analytics tools are based on personality concepts.
 
Personality describes our enduring personal characteristics as individuals, assuming that our personalities do not change over time. Personality concepts, e.g. the big five, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism still have and might have a place in people development as indicator of talents’ expected performance.
 
Nonetheless, we do not act in isolation.  Personality concepts developed in the pre-digital, pre-GFC days, characterised by stability and clearly defined boundaries no longer satisfy today’s talent needs.

Clearly, in the digital era interaction is key and as such the identity approach helps.

• Identity is a construct. Identity describes who we are.
• We have coexisting, multifaceted and overlapping identities.
• Identity is never static; it is always in the making, or in people development terms, identity is developmental. 

​Today’s connected workforce works in fast-shifting contexts. Talent needs recognition beyond the official business face – namely, recognition of their whole selves.

• Research shows that these identities can be organised in tangible (non-changeable) and intangible identity (developmental) elements.
• The tangible parts of your identity are those elements are immediately visible as seen by the naked eye.
• The intangible identity elements are covert; it requires effort to uncover them and to recognise them in others.
• Both their importance shifts depending on context.  

 
For example, when going to dinner, one’s identity as a vegetarian may be more crucial than one’s identity as a quantum physicist.

Cyber identity versus Physical Identity 

​The cyberspace is a culture of its own: people behave differently. In the cyberspace both the tangible and the intangible identities become cyberIdentities. Clearly, on social media profiles the tangible elements such as Gender or Ethnicity can be camouflaged by the use of an avatar. Nonetheless, in virtual meetings (conference calls) people hear your voice which might convey your age and gender. Your accent may give clues as to your origins.
 
The importance and visibility in the physical space of some of the elements converse in the cyberspace. For example, the ways you express professionalism differs strongly in virtual work: reliability, responsiveness, keeping promises outweighs appearance as in dress code and style.

Exploring Identity through a Tool

​Identity is covered through the cyberIdentity Development Tool (cyberIDT™), an online instrument that helps individuals and teams understand their own identity map and its implications for relationship building efforts in cross-boundary work.
 
For success in business, leaders learn the difference between personality and identity in three key areas:

1. Personal development and connected learning & development: advance from personality-based tools (e.g. MBTI) to the cyberIDT
   
   
2. Collaboration and community-building: create a people driven culture to enable highly empowered, interconnected, flexible team-working based on identity awareness
   
   
3. Cyber awareness: moving people from cyber harm (the manifestation of harm within and outside the cyberspace) to cyber safe (responsible people behaviour through raised cyberself awareness) whilst considering analytics to progress to an identity-based, less discriminatory approach.

 
For more information on identity and its tool, the cyberIDT Contact Us 


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References

​Abraham, P.E. 2015. Cyberconnecting. The Three Lenses of Diversity. Surrey, UK: Gower/Ashgate
 
Amann, P.; James, J.I. 2015. Designing robustness and resilience in digital investigations. DFRWS EU 2015 – Proceedings of the Second Annual DFRWS Europe. Digital Investigation, vol. 12, suppl. 1; S111-20. Online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174228761500016X (accessed 3 March 2016)
 
Bada, M., Sasse, A., Nurse, J.R.C. Cyber Security Awareness Campaigns: Why do they fail to change behaviour? In International Conference on Cyber Security for Sustainable Society, Coventry, UK, 2015, 118–131.
 
Kun, J.: Big data algorithms can discriminate, and it’s not clear what to do about it.
https://theconversation.com/big-data-algorithms-can-discriminate-and-its-not-clear-what-to-do-about-it-45849 (accessed 6 May 2016)