What 2,705 personality profiles reveal about collaboration

When collaboration becomes difficult, we often look first at roles, agreements, and processes. That makes sense, but it is not the whole story. Two people can read the same agreement and need something entirely different from it. One wants room to improvise. Another wants to know who will deliver what and when. One person thinks out loud. Another needs quiet before a useful answer appears.

I wanted to know how large those differences are in our own practice. I therefore analysed 2,705 Personal User Guide profiles with complete scores for all five Big Five dimensions. No names, individual profiles, or personal stories were used. The report contains aggregates only, and every reported group includes at least fifty profiles.

The short conclusion is that there is no convincing average colleague. Every dimension has enough variation to justify an explicit conversation about collaboration. At the same time, two patterns stand out: openness and conscientiousness are relatively often on the high side in this population, while emotional sensitivity is relatively often on the low side.

What exactly did we measure?

The Big Five describes personality across five continuous dimensions:

• Openness: your preference for new ideas, variety, and experimentation.
• Conscientiousness: your tendency towards planning, structure, and completion.
• Extraversion: how much energy you draw from stimulation and social contact.
• Agreeableness: how strongly you focus on harmony and other people’s needs.
• Emotional sensitivity: how strongly you experience stress, uncertainty, and negative emotions.

A score is not a grade. Higher is not better and lower is not worse. High conscientiousness can make a team reliable, but it can also become excessive control. Lower conscientiousness can become messy, but it may also create speed and flexibility. The useful part is the conversation about what a score means in visible behaviour.

The scale runs from 1 to 5. Demo profiles that we created ourselves are excluded from this analysis: their scores were not filled in by the person they describe, so they do not belong in research about real users.

The overall picture

Openness3.42

Conscientiousness3.3

Extraversion3.11

Agreeableness3.36

Emotional sensitivity2.63

Openness has the highest average at 3.42. Emotional sensitivity is lowest at 2.63. The third column matters just as much. Standard deviations range from 0.80 to 0.92. That is substantial on a 1 to 5 scale. An average can never tell you enough about the person in front of you.

Extraversion shows the widest spread at 0.92, followed by conscientiousness at 0.91. Those dimensions are highly visible in everyday teamwork. Do you prefer to form ideas together in a room, or think alone first? Do you plan early, or discover what is needed while working? Do you adjust frequently, or prefer to share something once it is complete?

Openness and conscientiousness are often high

For openness, 46% score above 3.5. Another 43% fall between 2.5 and 3.5, while 11% score below 2.5. Conscientiousness also has 46% above 3.5, but a larger group below 2.5 at 19%.

Openness46%

Conscientiousness46%

Extraversion36%

Agreeableness43%

Emotional sensitivity16%

This does not mean that nearly half the population is good at openness or conscientiousness. It means teams often include people who want to explore possibilities and people who want firm control over execution. Sometimes both preferences are strong in the same person. Sometimes two colleagues represent opposite sides.

That creates a familiar misunderstanding. The explorer experiences questions as brakes. The planner experiences an idea without boundaries as unnecessary risk. Neither person needs to be difficult. They are protecting different things.

A practical agreement might be: “Give me room to explore three options first. After that, let us define the criteria, owner, and deadline together.” This preserves both creativity and structure.

One meeting style never fits everyone

Extraversion is distributed most evenly. A quarter of profiles score below 2.5, 40% sit in the middle, and 36% score above 3.5. A process based entirely on loud brainstorming will therefore not work naturally for a large part of the group. The reverse is also true. A fully written and asynchronous approach leaves others without the interaction they need.

In teams, extraversion is often confused with engagement. Someone who responds quickly and talks often looks active. Someone who processes first and returns later with a considered answer may appear distant. The figures show why that assumption is risky: all three score bands are strongly represented.

A simple mixed format works better:

1. Send the central question beforehand.
2. Begin with two minutes of silent notes.
3. Discuss ideas out loud.
4. Leave room for written additions afterwards.

This is not an elaborate personality programme. It is a small process choice that respects different ways of thinking.

Emotional sensitivity is lower on average

Of the 2,705 profiles, 47% score below 2.5 on emotional sensitivity. Another 37% fall between 2.5 and 3.5, and 16% score above 3.5. The overall average is 2.63.

Lower is not automatically better. A lower score can support calm under pressure. A higher score may help someone notice risks, tension, or social signals sooner. Teams benefit from both. Problems begin when calm is read as indifference, or alertness is dismissed as overreaction.

This matters when giving feedback. The same casual sentence, “this is not good enough yet”, can be a practical update for one person and remain in another person’s mind all evening. Feedback does not need to become vague. It does become more useful when intent, importance, and the next step are explicit.

Language groups differ, but conclusions need restraint

Two language groups exceed the privacy threshold: 2,090 English profiles and 607 Dutch profiles. Locale is a language preference, not a country or nationality.

The Dutch-language group averages 3.30 on extraversion, compared with 3.06 in the English-language group, a difference of 0.24. Emotional sensitivity moves in the opposite direction at 2.46 versus 2.68, a difference of 0.22. Other differences are smaller: conscientiousness is 3.38 versus 3.27, openness 3.36 versus 3.44, and agreeableness 3.33 versus 3.37.

These are useful questions for future research, not proof of a cultural effect. We do not know how age, sector, acquisition channel, or use case is distributed across both groups.

What the analysis cannot tell us

The current data model does not reliably record whether a guide was created for work, dating, family, or sport. Country is absent as well. We therefore did not publish work versus private-life comparisons or country rankings.

This is also not a representative sample of the general population. It describes people who completed a Personal User Guide profile. Team diversity could not be published either. There are fewer than fifty teams with at least two assessed and accepted members, so that slice remains below the privacy threshold.

Turn preferences into concrete agreements

The figures confirm what I repeatedly see in practice. Differences that make collaboration harder are often predictable, but remain unspoken. We expect others to need roughly what we need. When they behave differently, we call it resistance, carelessness, dominance, or low engagement.

A personal manual helps only when scores become observable behaviour. Do not write only, “I am introverted.” Write:

Send me a complex question beforehand when possible. I often listen first in a meeting; that does not mean I have no opinion. Give me room to add something afterwards.

Do not write only, “I am conscientious.” Make it useful:

I work best when the owner, goal, and deadline are clear. If they are still open, tell me that we are deliberately exploring.

Read how Personal User Guide works to turn preferences into practical agreements, or create a guide for collaboration.

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Explore the most and least common personality profile combinations. If you want to turn insight into action immediately, use the practical guide to creating your own personal user manual.