One profile, five stories an autoethnography of sense-making and meaning-making of a personality profile

One profile, five stories an autoethnography of sense-making and meaning-making of a personality profile
Carine Metselaar, Eva de Hullu, Maarten Derksen
Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp.-

Senior professionals and managers employed by large organizations regularly participate in leadership development interventions that include a personality inventory. This research paper aims to address how the first author and five feedback coaches make sense and meaning of the results of these inventories and interpret this process in terms of Perceptual Control Theory.

The first author engaged in five separate feedback sessions with five different feedback coaches based on the results of a leadership assessment instrument and kept a diary to reflect upon these sessions. Her meaning-making process is discussed in relation to the Perceptual Control Theory.

The autoethnographic reflections demonstrated that only feedback that was compatible with her sense of identity led to additional self-reflection, sometimes leading to enhanced self-awareness. It also confirmed the idiosyncrasy of sensemaking of personality profiles resulting from a personality assessment instrument and suggested that working with multiple interpretations of a personality profile comes with additional benefits.

We recommend that organizations using self-scored personality assessments consider the benefits of allowing multiple perspectives on personality profiles. We suggest inviting the individuals concerned to take an active role in the sensemaking and meaning-making process of their own profiles. This approach may not align with the traditional positivist interpretation of validated personality instruments. However, adopting the view that personality narratives are not fixed or self-evident, but rather co-constructed by individuals, could encourage recipients of such feedback to actively engage in creating their own story rather than passively accepting others’ interpretations of who they are.

The topic of sense-making and meaning-making of personality inventory results has, at least to our understanding, never been approached by means of an autoethnography nor discussed in relation to Perceptual Control Theory.