A study on the effects of personality traits on building effective relationships

Article history: Received January 24, 2014 Accepted 20 June 2014 Available online June 25 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the effects of five big personality traits on development of effective communication among middle level managers of the first private Iranian bank, Bank Eghtesade Novin, in city of Tehran, Iran. To measure the effects of five big personality traits, the study uses a questionnaire developed by Jackson (1974) [Jackson, D. N. (1974). Personality research form manual. Research Psychologists Press.]. In addition, to measure the impacts of effective communication we use another questionnaire. All questions are designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alphas for two mentioned questionnaires were calculated as 0.92 and 0.74, respectively. The implementation of Pearson test as well as regression analysis have revealed that there were some positive and meaningful relationship between four personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and effective communication. In addition, there was a negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and effective communication. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Building effective communication plays essential role for business development in today's competitive business industry.There are literally various studies on learning the effects of different personality characteristics on business development (Jannesari et al., 2013).Tehran and Khaledi (2014), for instance, examined the effects of big Five factors including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism on creativity and innovation among selected employees of municipality in city of Tehran, Iran.The study detected negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and creativity and innovation, a positive and meaningful relationship between extraversion and creativity and innovation and finally a positive and meaningful relationship between openness and creativity and innovation.However, the study did not find any relationship between agreeableness as well as conscientiousness and creativity & innovation.Hoseinifar et al. (2011) performed a survey on relationship between creativity and five factors of personality in high school students of Ardabil.They detected that boys were more creative than girls were.In addition, they indicated that among five factors of personality, openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness were positive predictor of creativity and neurosis was negative predictor of creativity.Yesil and Sozbilir (2013) performed an empirical investigation on the effect of personality on individual innovation behavior in the workplace based on studying the effects of five personality traits.Dehghanan et al. (2014) presented an investigation on the effects of big five personal traits on emotional intelligence on some Iranian firms located in city of Tehran, Iran.They reported a positive and meaningful relationship between four components namely, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness well as openness and emotional intelligence.Besides, the study detected a negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and emotional intelligence.Aziziha et al. (2014) presented a study to measure the impact of personal characteristics including neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness and agreeableness on word of mouth advertisement.The study confirmed the positive of effects of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience on word of mouth advertisement and the negative impact of agreeableness on word of mouth advertisement.However, the study did not find any meaningful relationship between conscientiousness and word of mouth advertisement.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the effects of five big personality traits on development of effective communication among middle level managers of the first private Iranian bank, Bank Eghtesade Novin, in city of Tehran, Iran.To measure the effects of five big personality traits, the study uses a questionnaire developed by Jackson (1974) [Jackson, D. N. (1974).Personality research form manual. Research Psychologists Press.].In addition, to measure the impacts of effective communication we use another questionnaire.All questions are designed in Likert scale and Fig. 1 shows details of proposed study.1.There is a negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism behavior and effective communication.
2. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between extraversion behavior and effective communication.

Neuroticism Extraversion
Openness Agreeableness Conscientiousness Effective communication 3.There is a positive and meaningful relationship between being openness and effective communication.
4. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between agreeableness behavior and effective communication.
5. There is a positive and meaningful relationship between conscientiousness behavior and effective communication.
The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the sample size, z is CDF of normal distribution and finally  is the error term.For our study we assume and e=0.05, the number of sample size is calculated as N=162.In our survey, 53.9% of the participants were male and 46.1% of them were female.Fig. 2 shows details of the personal characteristics of the participants.

Years of education
Age Job position

Fig. 2. Personal characteristics of the participants
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, most participants hold good educational background.In addition, they were mostly middle aged people and enrolled in middle level as well as top level management positions.Cronbach alphas for two mentioned questionnaires were calculated as 0.92 and 0.74, respectively.We have applied Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and the results have indicated that the data were normally distributed.Therefore, we use parametric test to verify the hypotheses of the survey.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing the hypotheses of the survey.We first look at Pearson correlation test between different components of five big personality traits and effective communication.Table 1 demonstrates the results of our findings.The results of Table 1 confirm all hypotheses of the survey when the level of significance is one percent.In other words, while neuroticism behavior negatively influences on effective communication, being extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness influence on effective communication, positively.Table 2 shows the summary of stepwise regression test.

Conclusion
In this survey, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of five personality traits on building effective communication among middle level as well as top-level managers of an Iranian private bank.The survey results have indicated that having Neuroticism attitude negatively influenced on having effective communication.However, being extraversion and openness influence on building effective communication, positively.The results of our findings are consistent with similar studies like Tehran and Khaledi (2014) and Dehghanan et al. (2014).

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The proposed study According to Fig. 1, the following five hypotheses are considered for the proposed study of this paper.
The results of Table2indicate three independent variables, Extraversion, Openness and Neuroticism influence on dependent variable, effective communication.The results of t-value are statistically significant and the sign of coefficients are consistent with the hypotheses of the survey.