To understand properly the concept ‘Personality’ it’s of great importance to realize that there are two completely different worlds involved; an Inner world and an Outside world. In between there is a flexible membrane, an adjustable filter-and-communication device, regulating the interactions between both worlds, also known as ‘personality’. In other words, personality arises from frictions and pressures between the Inner world and the Outside world.The term Personality is derived from the Latin word ‘Persona’. Originally this word alluded to the masks actors wore to evoke an emotion or a mood.
This type of personality (or mask) people develop when the outside world is restricted to the professional context. |
Personality Types Today, a personality still is sort of a mask people use to present themselves towards the outside world. Becoming a ‘cultural being’ forces us to deny and suppress partially our true nature and show a more cultivated mask. We distinguish four important types of ‘masks’ or personalites.The Private Personality |
This is your deepest personality, the one almost nobody else knows about. It’s you in your private world where nobody sees you. In this world, there are no rules of civilization, no obligatory tasks, no witnesses. It’s your exclusive and secret world, ruled by you and you alone, known by you and you alone…
This mask you’ll wear when you’re together with ‘beloved’; partner, close relatives, intimate friends. This is a very tricky mask as you have to show your self a bit vulnerable if you want to build up real relations. The longer you’re intimate with someone, the more your private personality will weigh on a relation, the more ‘the little traits’ pop up…
The intimate personality is the most schizophrenic mask you wear as the world outside is colored almost completely by one person.
With your public personality you go to the market, you attend events, you visit public places, go to church, talk with the neighbor. This is the most ‘normal’ but less natural mask you wear. This mask is mould by rules of decency and citizenship, created by culture.
This mask is seldom close to truth as we all try to show the best of our selves in public. This is the mask a candidate will wear at the interview for a job.
With this mask you try to accord in the best possible way you can with a professional role: worker, manager, salesman, accountant, nurse and so on. A professional role is a collection of expectations employers cherish. Those expectations an employer writes down in a job description. The more your professional personality matches with those expectations, the better the chances are you will be successful in the job.
Starting in a new job, you’ll always wear your Public mask, enriched and stimulated by your professional affinities and your profound wish to make the best of it.
The more you get familiarized with colleagues and tasks, the more contacts become intimate, the more opportunities you see at the one hand, but the higher the risks on conflicts on the other hand.
But there is more. In fact, an employer pays you to get permission for controlling your time-space during working hours and the lower you are in hierarchy, the more.
There are a lot of jobs where people are asked to put on a ‘work-mask’, a ‘professional public mask’. Nurses, waiters, agents, actors, receptionists, shop assistants, guards, teachers, police officers, bank clerks, politicians,… This mask will often drop as soon as the job is done. The better though this mask fits ‘naturally’, the more chances the employee has to be successful.