The need for extra caution when using studies reporting the impact of personality on knowledge behaviors
The role of personality and personality traits in knowledge management (KM) is increasingly attracting the interest of both researchers and practitioners. To help knowledge managers better understand how personality affects knowledge behaviors, notable KM researcher Alexander Serenko has carried out a structured literature review of 200 studies1.
The review has found that many KM researchers are inadequately aware of the personality psychology literature, with their conclusions on the predictive power of many personality traits contradictory and inconclusive. Particularly unclear is the role of the Big Five personality traits2, performance-approach/avoidance goal orientation3, and personal motivation traits. Serenko alerts that:
Personality trait constructs cannot simply be blindly borrowed from the psychology literature and recklessly added to knowledge management causal models.
Implications for KM practitioners
From the review findings, Serenko offers important advice to KM practitioners:
1. Most importantly, KM practitioners need to exercise extra caution when interpreting and applying the recommendations of studies reporting the impact of employee personality traits on productive and counterproductive knowledge behavior.
Of particular concern are the highly popular Big Five traits. Despite a large volume of research, the actual impact of these traits on productive and counterproductive knowledge behavior still remains unknown.
2. There are several traits that exhibit consistent impacts on knowledge behavior.
Emotional intelligence – an employee’s mental ability to understand his/her own and other people’s emotions and to regulate and use his/her own emotions – facilitates productive and suppresses counterproductive knowledge behavior. Indeed, emotional intelligence in the workplace represents one of ten dimensions of practical wisdom4, which is a highly attractive employee quality.
Other desirable employee traits include learning-approach goal orientation (persistently improving existing and gaining new competencies) and prosocial cooperative value orientation (equally maximizing both one’s own and others’ outcomes).
In addition, organizations should refrain from hiring workers exhibiting the dark triad traits5 (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and having a strong sense of psychological entitlement (a pervasive sense that one deserves and is entitled to more than others) because these definitely lead to devastating consequences from the knowledge management perspective.
Given the importance of the dark triad personality traits in the knowledge behavior context, practitioners are advised to explore the intricacies of their workplace and understand what situational cues may activate the dark triad traits of their employees. Personality traits have no effect on a worker’s behavior until they are exposed to a trait-relevant situational cue that activates a particular trait. Thus, removing cues that trigger the undesirable dark triad traits (i.e., removing distracters) may improve employees’ knowledge behavior.
The same line of reasoning applies to constraints: managers need to learn how to create constraints for cues leading to the dark triad traits. Consider, for example, an employee exhibiting a strong psychopathy trait (i.e., one of the dark triad traits), which may cause knowledge sabotage. Being assigned to mentor a junior co-worker presents a strong situational cue to activate the psychopathy trait and the corresponding knowledge sabotage behavior toward an unsuspecting victim who cannot fight back. However, assigning this person to work with senior, experienced co-workers would constrain the cue and reduce the chance of misbehavior. In addition, creating comprehensive and enforceable policies that allow victims of knowledge sabotage to take formal action against perpetrators would also serve as a constraint and further suppress such pernicious actions.
3. The academic literature on this topic is scattered across a large number of business and non-business journals.
This makes familiarization with the relevant body of knowledge a daunting task for busy professionals. Instead of searching for individual articles, Serenko advises KM practitioners to rely on review studies that summarize the dispersed literature and present it in an easily accessible format. Presenting the findings of such reviews is a key aspect of the purpose of RealKM Magazine.
Header image source: Created by Bruce Boyes with Microsoft Designer Image Creator.
References:
- Serenko, A. (2026). A structured literature review of personality traits research in the knowledge behavior context: synthesis of the findings and practical recommendations. VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 56(1), 139-172. ↩
- Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. ↩
- Darnon, C., Harackiewicz, J. M., Butera, F., Mugny, G., & Quiamzade, A. (2007). Performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals: When uncertainty makes a difference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(6), 813-827. ↩
- Serenko, A. (2024). Practical wisdom in the workplace: conceptualization, instrument development, and predictive power. Journal of Knowledge Management, 28(7), 2092-2119. ↩
- Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. ↩
