Why We Misread Human Behavior at Work

Personality, Culture, and the Leadership Blind Spot

Walk into any organization and you will find leaders who can confidently recite their DISC color, or Enneagram number or MBTI type. These tools have become part of corporate folklore. They promise to make human behavior predictable, legible, and manageable. When a team struggles, someone may ask: “Do we have too many introverts?” When a conflict emerges: “Is she a Driver?” When a hire fails: “Maybe he wasn’t the right fit.”

This desire for clarity is understandable. Organizations are complex; people even more so. Leaders under pressure want quick explanations and simple answers. But the very tools designed to offer reassurance often obscure the more powerful forces shaping behavior—context, norms, power, expectations, and culture. The result is an organizational habit of looking in the wrong place, misreading what they see, and intervening at the wrong level.

This article explains why personality science, when properly understood, is extraordinarily useful and also deeply limited; why typologies persist despite their flaws; why culture is the real engine of behavior; and why Inclusive Leadership offers a more coherent response to the complexity of modern organizational life.

The Science of Personality

Across decades of research, the Five-Factor Model (FFM) has emerged as the most empirically supported framework for describing personality. The dimensions of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism appear across languages, cultures, and measurement approaches (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008; McCrae & Costa, 2008). But their relevance in organizational settings is narrower than many leaders assume.

Meta-analytic findings show that Conscientiousness is the only dimension that reliably predicts performance across most roles (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000). An employee who consistently tracks details, follows through, and structures their time effectively is more likely to succeed regardless of industry. Extraversion predicts who tends to emerge as a leader, but not who will perform well once in the role. In practice, this means the charismatic person who dominates early meetings may not be the one who builds a cohesive team or executes a long-term strategy (Judge et al., 2002). Emotional stability (low Neuroticism) correlates modestly with resilience and job satisfaction (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998).

Even in the strongest cases, personality traits account for only a small portion of variance in real-world performance. People are more variable—more situational—than trait scores imply. Research on “personality states” shows that the same individual may appear cautious in a hierarchical meeting yet playful with peers; methodical when expectations are clear yet inconsistent when priorities shift (Fleeson, 2001; Sherman et al., 2015). Consider a manager known for being “reserved”—yet in moments of moral conviction, such as pushing back on an unethical decision, she speaks with striking intensity. Or a typically meticulous analyst who becomes error-prone when the team is understaffed and priorities constantly change.

Trait Activation Theory captures this nuance: traits express themselves only when situations cue them (Tett & Burnett, 2003). A conscientious person can behave unreliably in a chaotic environment; an introverted engineer can take charge during a crisis when expertise matters more than social ease.

The implication for leaders is simple and uncomfortable: personality matters, but it never acts alone. Any approach that treats personality traits as destiny will mislead and oversimplify, if not outright fail. Consider, for example, the following scenarios that are based on real cases. They stand in for too many similar cases across organisations:

1. A global product-team in a multinational organization: a high-stakes initiative, tight deadlines, debates raging around design, marketing, and engineering. In the first week of meetings, a new colleague, Alina, listens. She never interrupts. She rarely volunteers. When the session ends, a senior colleague mutters: “She’s passive. She lacks initiative.” Another nods, “Probably not cut out for this kind of dynamic.” A few weeks later the team restructured its process and changed the meeting-facilitator, who introduced a brainwriting segment instead of the free-for-all brainstorming; i.e.,  “silent-brainstorm + write-down + read-out”. And, Alina begins contributing framed, thoughtful ideas. Her proposals win praise and she emerges as a key contributor.

2.  After many rounds of interviewing, Liam was finally hired by a professional services firm as a “Partner”. He is a high performer from an industry client and promised to be a great asset for the firm, helping to launch new capabilities. Unexpectedly, Liam struggled. He did not realize the intense pressure to prove himself credible in every meeting, the reputational significance of writing PowerPoint slides, the norm of “humble self-promotion” and other informal practices that governed success in the firm. He struggled to get traction and was quickly seen as “an ineffective communicator” and “uncollaborative” by the other partners in the business.

Neither Alina’s nor Liam’s personality changed, nor did their skills. But their environment had. 

Alina’s team conflated silence with passivity, read it as a personality deficit and judged her for it. When the cultural format of problem solving and team interaction changed, this error was made visible. Once the format changed, her contributions could surface and become recognized. 

Liam’s colleagues, on the other hand, underestimated the role of unwritten and largely unconscious rules and structure to success. They defaulted to labeling him, which absolved them and the organizational system from responsibility. As a result, Liam did not stay with the firm.

These two examples reveal a truth that is too often ignored: What we call “personality” and describe as personal traits is inseparable from the cultural and situational frame in which we observe and interpret behavior.

Predicting and Managing Human Behavior: Why Organizations Keep Looking in the Wrong Place

Despite the evidence, organizations remain attached to personality typologies such as MBTI, DISC, and the Enneagram. Their persistence has nothing to do with scientific validity and everything to do with psychological utility. Typologies offer neat categories, accessible language, and the comfort of identity-based storytelling. In workshops, people enjoy the moment of recognition: “Oh, that explains me.” Teams bond over common labels. Leaders leave thinking they understand their people better.

But the scientific record is clear. MBTI has poor test–retest reliability—many people receive different types when retaking the test only weeks later (Boyle, 1995; Pittenger, 2005). Its binaries distort continuous traits (McCrae & Costa, 1989). And most damningly, it does not predict job performance, leadership effectiveness, teamwork quality, or decision-making under pressure.

Yet typologies persist largely because they allow leaders to talk about differences without confronting deeper drivers of behavior: norms, power dynamics, role expectations, status threats, and cultural assumptions. They give coherence without accuracy, confidence without truth.

The costs are real. Consider a high-potential woman labeled an “introvert” who is repeatedly passed over for stretch assignments assumed to require assertiveness—despite consistently outperforming her more extroverted peers; or a team that attributes growing conflict to “clashing types” rather than to unclear decision rights and a leader who avoids hard conversations. Typologies routinely conflate preference with capability and create excuses for systems that need structural change.

The harm becomes acute in hiring and selection. Evidence-based selection relies on structured interviews (Campion et al., 1997), work samples, validated cognitive measures (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998), and established personality inventories grounded in the Big Five (Ones et al., 2012). Typologies offer none of this. They are neither predictive, fair, nor job-related. Using them in hiring introduces bias, creates false confidence, and violates basic standards of selection validity (EEOC, 1978).

Understanding Behavior Requires Shifting from Personality to Culture

To understand human behavior, organizations must look beyond traits to the cultural systems that shape them. Culture is not a poster of values or a branding exercise. It is the pattern of implicit expectations about behavior, emotion, and meaning that a group reinforces—what feels acceptable, risky, rewarded, or unthinkable.

Culture determines why a normally confident leader becomes unusually deferential when presenting to a senior executive known for unpredictable criticism. Why a collaborative team becomes territorial after a restructuring that suddenly ties bonuses to internal competition. Why a newcomer who thrived in a transparent, feedback-friendly culture grows quiet in a context where dissent is punished subtly but reliably.

This is why contemporary selection science emphasizes Person–Environment Fit (P–E Fit). Person–Job Fit assesses alignment between skills and role demands; Person–Organization Fit examines compatibility with the norms and cultural logic of the organization (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005; Verquer et al., 2003). Crucially, P–O fit is a cultural construct, not a personality one. [Please note that “fit” does not convey the real meaning it is trying to convey. It does not necessarily mean sameness or imply assimilation. It is really about interaction, or perhaps more accurately: “resonant interaction”: the dynamic interplay between individual and environment.]

Organizations that treat personality types or descriptors as a proxy for cultural alignment are confusing categories with context. Culture is the real explanatory engine of behavior. Personality describes tendencies; culture determines which tendencies become expressed, constrained, or reinterpreted.

Leaders who focus on personality label individuals. Leaders who focus on culture diagnose systems. Leaders need to focus on the space in between, the interplay between personality and culture.

Moving Beyond Traits to Stewardship

If behavior emerges from the interplay between traits and context, then leadership must extend far beyond “managing personalities.” It becomes the work of shaping the cultural environment that gives those personalities their meaning.

Inclusive Leadership captures this shift with clarity: it is the collective stewardship of culture where all can thrive.

Leadership is collective because culture is produced through the everyday actions of people at every level—how decisions are made, whose voice is valued, what conflict styles are tolerated, which behaviors are quietly rewarded. Leadership is stewardship because culture cannot be engineered; it must be tended, interpreted, and shaped with care. And leadership aims for conditions where all can thrive because thriving is not a soft aspiration—it is the prerequisite for learning, innovation, and adaptive capacity.

Inclusive Leadership is, at its core, a meaning-making practice:

1. Attending to how different people experience and interpret the same situation.

2. Notice who adjusts and who expects others to adjust to them.

3. Treat conflict as data about underlying norms, identities, and expectations. 

4. Redesign rituals, routines, feedback loops, and decision processes so that more people can participate fully and safely.

Importantly, this approach does not discard personality science. It uses it appropriately—without mistaking it for destiny or allowing it to overshadow cultural dynamics. Instead of asking, “What kind of person is this?” inclusive leaders ask, “What kind of context have we created, and what meaning does it hold for different people?” The shift is profound:

• from labeling individuals to understanding systems;

• from diagnosing people to diagnosing culture;

• from seeing behavior as fixed to seeing it as co-produced by traits, norms, power, history, and interaction.

Inclusive Leadership offers the corrective. It redirects attention to where behavior actually lives—in the ongoing co-creation of culture—and clarifies the leader’s responsibility to shape it intentionally. It replaces typological shortcuts with disciplined cultural inquiry, combines validated personality insights with evidence-based selection, and recognizes culture as the living, adaptive system leaders must steward.

This is not a moral add-on—it is the core capability for leading diverse, complex, modern organizations.

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