WMBA 6605 Week 2 Personality Inventory Paper Example

Ninety-Fourth Percentile on Conscientiousness, Forty-First on Openness: Reading One IPIP-NEO-120 Result Against Three Episodes From My Own Record, and the Narrower Statement It Supports

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6605: Finding Your Inner Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Ninety-Fourth Percentile on Conscientiousness, Forty-First on Openness: Reading One IPIP-NEO-120 Result Against Three Episodes From My Own Record, and the Narrower Statement It Supports

The Instrument and the Raw Result

On July 12, 2026, I completed the 120-item version of the IPIP-NEO, a public-domain measure of the five-factor model of personality developed from the International Personality Item Pool and validated by Johnson (2014). It is hosted online by its author, takes about fifteen minutes and reports percentiles against a large sample of adults who took the same form. I took it at my kitchen table on a Sunday evening, in one sitting.

Table 1

My IPIP-NEO-120 Domain Results

Percentiles compare my scores with those of other adults who completed the same form.

Within conscientiousness, two facets were highest: orderliness at the 97th percentile and cautiousness at the 91st. Achievement striving was at the 88th. Within openness, the lowest facet was adventurousness, at the 23rd percentile, meaning a stated preference for familiar routines over new ones.

What the Result Means in Operational Terms

A conscientiousness score at the 94th percentile means I described myself as more organized, dutiful and deliberate than about nineteen of every twenty adults in the comparison sample. In behavior, the instrument predicts that I keep schedules, finish what I start, plan before acting and dislike leaving things unresolved. The orderliness facet was driven most by two items about keeping things in their place and following a set routine, both of which I marked at the top of the scale. Cautiousness was driven by two items about thinking before acting and avoiding rash decisions.

The adventurousness facet is the more interesting result. I marked low on items about preferring variety and trying new activities. That pattern, a high need for order and a low appetite for novelty, is internally consistent, but it describes a manager who may resist changes to a process that already works.

What the instrument does not claim to measure matters as much. It measures broad personality traits as I report them. It does not measure leadership skill, intelligence or how other people see me. Judge et al. (2002), in a meta-analysis of studies linking the five traits to leadership, found extraversion to be the trait most consistently linked to leadership, with conscientiousness and low neuroticism also related and agreeableness only weakly. My profile is strong on two of those traits and only average on the one with the strongest link, so the result does not by itself support a claim that I am a natural leader.

Testing the Result Against My Record

I set the result beside three episodes from the past two years.

The first supports it. In 2025 I rebuilt our month-end close calendar into a task list of 142 steps with owners and deadlines, and the close fell from eight working days to five. That is conscientiousness in its most useful form: a team that knows what is due and when.

The second also supports it, though less comfortably. In March 2025 I resolved a stalled accrual dispute between our plant controller and treasurer by putting both positions on one page and asking what would reverse the entry. Orderliness helped; I structured a disagreement that had no structure.

The third is awkward. In October 2025 our team argued for two weeks over adopting a new reconciliation tool. I wanted it, but I kept asking for one more test before switching, and our CFO finally decided. Looking back, my cautiousness, at the 91st percentile, and my low adventurousness pulled in opposite directions from my stated preference. I said I wanted the change and behaved as though I did not. The instrument predicted the behavior better than my own account of it did.

What the Result Does Not Explain

The inventory says nothing about the March 2025 episode that a different profile would not also explain. A manager with average conscientiousness and high extraversion might have ended that dispute by talking both people into a compromise rather than by writing a page. The outcome would have been similar; the route would have differed. The result therefore describes how I tend to work, not whether my way works better than another. It also gives no information about how my team experiences my orderliness. Ninety-fourth percentile conscientiousness in a manager can feel like reliability to one accountant and like being watched to another, and only they can say which. Those questions belong to the feedback assignment later in the term, and I have written them down so the inventory's answer does not stand in for theirs. A score describes a tendency; colleagues can describe its effects.

Limitations

The result is a self-report, and self-reports have known limits. People describe themselves as they believe they are, and some traits are easier for others to judge than for ourselves. Vazire (2010) reported that acquaintances outperform the self in rating desirable, evaluative traits, while the self has the edge on inner states such as anxiety, which suggests my low neuroticism score is more trustworthy than my high conscientiousness score, since conscientiousness is a trait people like to claim.

The conditions also matter. I took the inventory at the start of a leadership course, knowing it would be discussed, which may have encouraged answers that matched the person I want to be. A Sunday evening, after a calm week, may have lowered my neuroticism score. A retest during a month-end close would be a fairer check.

A Narrower Statement

The result does not support the label it is tempting to adopt, "a highly conscientious leader." It supports something narrower: I build order where there is none and keep to it reliably, and the same preference for order makes me slow to abandon a working routine even when I have said I want to change it. That statement can be tested this term by watching how I respond the next time a teammate proposes a new way of doing something we already do well.

References

Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the five factor model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765-780. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765

Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281-300. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017908