How employees’ personality traits affect the 
perceived psychological safety in the context of 
digital business transformation projects. 
 
 
 
 
Information Systems Science 
Master's thesis 
 
 
Author(s): 
Matias Mäkinen 
 
Supervisor(s): 
Jukka Heikkilä 
 
27.06.2023 
Turku 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The originality of this thesis has been checked in accordance with the University of Turku 
quality assurance system using the Turnitin Originality Check service.  
 
Bachelor's thesis / Master's thesis  / Licentiate thesis / Doctoral thesis 
 
Subject: Information Systems Science 
Author(s): Matias Mäkinen 
Title: How employees’ personality traits affect the perceived psychological safety in the context 
of digital business transformation projects. 
Supervisor(s): Jukka Heikkilä 
Number of pages: 56 pages + appendices 4 pages 
Date: 27.06.2023 
 
This study explores how individual’s personality traits affect the perceptions psychological safety 
in a business transformation project context. The topic is motivated by the fact that roughly 70% 
of business transformation efforts fail to meet their desired targets and involvement characterizes 
successful transformation efforts. Both key concepts in the study, psychological safety and human 
personality, have an effect on various organizational success factors, including engagement and 
motivation, and this Thesis offers a novel insight to the interplay of these factors in the context of 
digital business transformation. 
The research questions addressed in this study are: 1) How do an individual's personality traits 
affect their perception of psychological safety in a changing work environment? 2) How can the 
acknowledgment of personality dimensions and their connection to psychological safety be 
incorporated into change management practices? 
Methods used in this research study are both qualitative and quantitative in nature: quantitative 
personality trait assessment of the big-five personality traits utilizing the mini-IPIP questionnaire 
and qualitative semi-structured interviews which are thematically analysed. 
Key findings of the study highlight the importance of two personality traits Agreeableness and 
Extraversion. Large-scale technology projects require adaptation within the complex socio-
technical context, and the importance of employee voice behaviour emerged as a theme 
(associated with Extraversion) as a means for workers to keep up with the demanding and fast-
paced work environment. Agreeableness trait was found to impact the perception psychological 
safety via self-criticism. Across all traits one-to-one connection with both colleagues and 
managers was seen as the number one enabling factor for a psychologically safe team. 
With a few key insights found from the vast and complex relationship between organizational 
practices and psychological phenomena, this Thesis points a direction for future research to study 
further the connections between management practices, personality traits and perceptions of 
psychological safety. 
 
Key words: 1. The Big-Five Personality Traits 2. Psychological safety 3. Digital Business 
Transformation 4. Change Management  
  
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
1  Introduction 7  
1.1 Motivation for the study 8 
1.2 Aim of the study 11 
2  Theoretical background 12  
2.1 Digital business transformation 12 
2.2 Briefly on the human personality 13 
2.2.1 The Big Five personality traits 15 
2.2.2 HEXACO model of human personality 18 
2.2.3 Trait activation theory 19 
2.3 Psychological safety 20 
2.3.1 The known effects of a psychologically safe work environment 21 
2.4 Personality traits in a work environment 22 
3  Methodology 25  
3.1 On qualitative research methods 26 
3.1.1 Action research 26 
3.1.2 Interviews 27 
3.2 Choosing the personality trait assessment 28 
3.2.1 Scientific validity as an arising challenge 28 
3.2.2 International Personality Item Pool 30 
3.2.3 Data security and confidentiality 32 
3.3 Interview structure 33 
3.3.1 Selection of the interviewed professionals. 33 
3.3.2 The interview questions 34 
4  Data analysis and results 36  
4.1 Coding of the interviews and personality assessments 36 
4.2 Emerging themes 38 
4.2.1 Employee voice behaviours 38 
4.2.2 Self-criticism 40 
4.2.3 Managerial advice for fostering psychological safety 41 
4.2.4 Online vs Offline interactions 43 
5  Conclusions and discussion 45  
5.1 Limitations of the study 47 
5.2 Future research 48 
References 49  
Appendices 57  
Appendix 1 – Interview questions 57 
Appendix 2 – Research Data Management Plan 58 
 
  
LIST OF FIGURES 
Figure 1 The Five-Factor model of personality (Goldberg 1990; 1992). 18  
Figure 2 The pathways combining personality, psychological safety and team 
effectiveness. Modified from LePine et al. (2011), Edmondson (1999) 
and Newman et al. (2017). 24  
Figure 3 The big-five personality traits and psychological safety in the context of 
digital business transformations 46  
 
LIST OF TABLES 
Table 1 Interview coding as a starting point for thematic analysis. 37  
 
7 
 
1 Introduction 
According to multiple surveys conducted by McKinsey & Company roughly 70% of all 
business transformation projects fail (McKinsey 2021; 2017). Fifteen years after the first 
McKinsey study on organizational transformation, the results seem to be similar, so no 
drastic change has happened in change implementation and success in the transformation 
project field. In the 2021 survey less than a third of over a thousand respondents thought 
that transformation projects had both been successful in improving organizational 
performance and sustaining the improvements over time. Despite the increase in project 
management tools available, project success hasn’t increased overall. 
Involvement, especially in the lower levels of an organization, was reported to be a key 
element in a successful business transformation. Within these successful companies, 
respondents to the survey by McKinsey were also more likely to have other practices in 
place that would differentiate their transformation efforts. These practices included: 
Communicating in a consistent manner about the changes happening with a specific focus 
on frontline workers, clearly defined roles and responsibilities and having a strategic 
emphasis on talent management. Continuing with the same theme, if employees on all 
levels were not engaged with the transformation, the whole effort is running a risk to be 
doomed from the start. Within the respondents whose transformations had failed in 
engagement of frontline employees and managers alike only 3 percent reported of a 
successful business transformation. In comparison, the success rates were 26 and 28 
percent if both abovementioned groups were engaged instead. (McKinsey, 2017). 
As a project success factor psychological safety has been found to be an integral part of 
a team’s ability to adapt to change and learn. (Edmondson 1999; Carmeli et al. 2007; Liu 
et al. 2014). The question of why transformation projects do not meet the goals more 
often, why are the people not engaged in the change, and the importance of psychological 
safety to work teams lead me to think about the perceptions of psychological safety on an 
individual empoloyee’s level. What contributes to individual perception of psychological 
safety, perhaps the personality of the individual? This thought pattern led to the topic of 
this Thesis. 
Personality traits in general have been shown to predict how a team performs in a given 
task (Barrick et al., 1998). LePine et al. (2011) concluded in their literature review that 
8 
the effect of team member personality on team effectiveness is profound and there is a 
need for exploring additional traits, criteria and linking mechanisms. In this study I will 
use the terms personality dimension and personality trait as synonyms. I prefer the terms 
dimension and trait over a personality type since I’m not labelling anyone to any specific 
“type” of personality. As I will disclose later on, current understanding is that human 
personality is a complex phenomenon and therefore it makes more sense to describe it 
with scales and fluid dimensions rather than assigning specific types. Barrick & Mount 
(1991) found that personality traits presented in the five-factor model of personality 
(Extraversion, Emotional Stability/Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and 
Openness to Experience/Intellect) have numerous predictive capabilities in different job 
tasks for various occupations. For example: “extraversion was a valid predictor for two 
occupations involving social interaction, managers and sales (across criterion types).”. 
Since both psychological safety and individual personality traits seem to play an integral 
part in how a person thrives in an organizational environment, I decided to explore the 
connection between them further. After a rigorous literature search, there were no 
previous studies found that would utilize the same combined methodologies to explore 
the connection between these two recognized phenomena and take into account the 
context of digital business transformation projects as an operating environment. Thus, the 
main goal of the thesis is to shine a light on how the different dimensions of personality 
of employees affect the perceived psychological safety when facing change in digital 
business transformation projects. In addition, after conducting the research and having 
analysed the data, I hopefully can offer practical guidance for project managers on how 
to address these findings in a work context. Perceived psychological safety is seen as a 
success factor for IT project implementation. (Jitpaiboon et al. 2019; Witt 2016). By 
utilizing common sense, it would seem plausible that personalities of people would affect 
how they react to change, and in this light, how should they be helped to navigate such 
an environment. 
1.1 Motivation for the study 
Deep-level characteristics have been found to be more predictive of team performance 
than surface-level characteristics (Harrison et. al., 2002). Personality traits and 
psychological safety are deep-level characteristics. According to Kumar Basu (2015) 
business transformation efforts will eventually lose steam if leaders do not succeed in 
9 
 
creating a right mind-set for the employees, also if the leadership is unsuccessful in 
ensuring that right people invest a good amount of time on driving the necessary changes.  
The topic of the effect of individual’s personality traits on perceived psychological safety 
when facing change in digital business transformation projects is an important one for 
several reasons. First, transformation projects, especially large-scale ones, often involve 
significant changes to an organization's technology systems, processes, and structures, 
which can be a source of stress and anxiety for employees see e.g. technostress (Riedl, 
2013). Understanding how individual personality traits may influence an individual's 
perceived psychological safety during such changes can provide valuable insights for 
organizations looking to support their employees during these projects. Additionally, 
psychological safety has been shown to be an important predictor of team performance, 
creativity, and innovation, as well as employee well-being and job satisfaction. 
(Arumugam et al. 2013; Wong et al. 2010; Newman et al. 2017). Therefore, by 
understanding these relationships better organizations might be able to improve team 
performances, creativity, and innovation, as well as support the well-being and job 
satisfaction of their employees. While there has been a significant amount of research 
focusing on the connections between team personalities and project success or team 
performance, there were no studies found that would, in the context of digital business 
transformation projects, dive deep into the role that psychological safety and personality 
traits play in this complex environment. 
Team composition research has examined various member attributes such as age, gender, 
functional expertise, and abilities. However, personality traits are considered to be 
particularly crucial (Barrick & Mount 1991; Barrick et al. 1998) due to the fact that the 
thoughts, emotions, and actions that define an individual's personality not only have a 
direct impact on the contributions made by each team member towards achieving task 
objectives but also affect how team members interact and cooperate with each other 
during work performance. The number of interacting variables when doing research on 
performance and personality is vast and this has led to quite slow progression in the field 
of research focusing on personality traits, psychological phenomena like psychological 
safety and work performance. (LePine et al. 2011). My research taps into this continuum 
of studies that focus on the relationships between these factors. According to research 
conducted by LePine (2003) the five-factor model of personality is effective in 
10 
determining what characteristics manifest themselves in a positive manner in groups that 
are likely to experience frequent changes in job tasks and require greater adaptability. 
In an internal study by Google (rework blog 2015) it was found that psychological safety 
was the most important dynamic that made a team great. This study was also reported 
comprehensively by the New York Times Magazine under the headline “What Google 
Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” (Charles Duhigg, 2016). Data was 
collected via a tool called gTeams from over 3000 employees and 300 teams over a one-
year time period. The key findings were reported in a re:Work blog by Julia Rozovsky, 
Analyst at Google People Operations. According to their findings “who is on a team 
matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their 
contributions.”. Another astonishing finding was that “Individuals on teams with higher 
psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the 
power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re 
rated as effective twice as often by executives.”. Although the scientific validity of this 
research isn’t as strong because of the corporate in-house nature without traditional with 
peer-review process for example, it still shines a bright light on the importance of 
psychological safety as a phenomenon. The researchers at Google looked at vast amounts 
of data, looking for patterns but no evidence that the composition of individual team 
members made any difference, they compared skills, personality types and backgrounds 
from 180 teams. The question of who is on the team didn’t seem to matter. In the Project 
Aristotle the team started to look for social norms within teams, the right norms would 
raise the intelligence of the group and wrong ones would tamper the performance even 
though on an individual level the members were very clever minded. (The New York 
Times, 2016). While the researchers studied the behaviours of teams, they noticed two 
main points: successful teams all shared two key behaviours. A team will be greater than 
the sum of its part if people speak roughly an equal amount of time also called “equality 
in distribution of conversational turn-taking” and if members have good emotional 
intelligence, meaning individuals know how to show empathy toward their teammates. 
These aspects of successful teams are within the construct of psychological safety – and 
this Google research is one showcase of why this Thesis research matters. 
Knowledge work in general is getting more focused in organizations and therefore there 
is a greater need for effective collaboration between people who have very specific set of 
skills. Information and ideas needs to be shared efficiently among different stakeholders 
11 
 
in an organization, without psychologically safe culture there seems to be less trust and 
the value of shared (bold) ideas decreases (Newman et al. 2017). 
 
1.2 Aim of the study 
This study is aimed to direct future research in the topic of how personality traits affect 
individual’s functioning in an organization, in this case, the perceived psychological 
safety in the digital business transformation context. The extent to which results from a 
Master’s Thesis can be applied in business context is limited, yet there is hope that my 
findings will provide change management organizations with some practical advise on 
how take personalities and psychological safety into account. 
Newman et al. (2017) point out that “TAT (Trait Activation Theory) suggests that the 
influence of personality traits may depend on inducements offered by the context 
(situational cues), and therefore provides an explanation as to how organizational 
climates, such as psychological safety climate, might interact with the personality traits 
of the employee to predict their work behaviors and attitudes.”. Based on numerous 
studies, I’ve concluded that the connection of the dimensions of personality and the 
perceived psychological safety is relevant and should be further examined. 
My two research questions are: 
• How do an individual’s personality traits affect their perception of psychological 
safety in a changing work environment? 
• How could acknowledgment of these dimensions of personality and their 
connections to psychological safety be incorporated to change management 
practices? 
12 
2 Theoretical background 
One of the key challenges for this Thesis will be that studying human personality 
combined with psychological safety and IT project context, each a complex topic on their 
own, needs skilfully written structure for my Thesis to be easily readable. I’ve searched 
literature mainly from Google Scholar and Scopus with keyword combinations like 
“psychological safety” and “*personality*”. “Personality type” and “team performance”, 
“personality type” and “project management”, “Personality trait” and “psychological 
safety”. I have also gone through the reference lists of the most relevant articles found in 
Scopus and Google Scholar with identified keywords. Often times, while reading an 
article it provided me with a lot of additional material to build my literature review. 
In this section I will explain briefly what digital business transformation means, what we 
know about the human personality; the relevant theories considered that would explain 
the studied phenomena and what is yet debatable in the scientific community. In addition, 
I go through the definition and known effects of psychological safety. In the paper, the 
term digital business transformation refers to organizational rather than industrial level of 
the phenomenon. 
2.1 Digital business transformation 
The digital era has transformed many core business operations either through digital 
innovation or digitization of processes and has also re-defined management concepts and 
shaken organizational structures. Sometimes whole business models have changed due to 
emergence of new technology. (Matt et al. 2015). Digital transformation refers to a multi-
layered change within an organization, driven by technological advancements that happen 
also outside the company. It encompasses two main aspects: the utilization of digital 
technologies to enhance current operational processes and the pursuit of digital 
innovation, which has the potential to revolutionize the organization's business model. 
Digital innovation involves the integration of digital technologies and physical elements 
to develop unique digital processes, products and services, as outlined by Yoo and others 
(2010). In order for most of these strategical digital changes to have an effect on the 
organization, humans must be able to adapt to the new ways of working. Organizational 
culture, learning and leadership play an integral part on how companies innovate and 
adopt new digital elements in their (core) functions. (Jiménez-Jiménez & Sanz-Valle, 
13 
 
2011). Organizational learning enables innovation and innovation helps firms to achieve 
success in the market. Knowledge gathered can help an organization to drive change 
within an organization and its strategic partners. This organizational learning is mediated 
by how teams work together and in that togetherness, concepts like psychological safety 
are extremely relevant. (Tippins & Sohi, 2003). 
For the last 10 years the IT function of a company has experienced significant increases 
in the expectations and the importance to core business in many fields has grown – the 
trend of digitalization has made operational efficiency and technology intertwine in a way 
that they are no longer easily separable concepts. Information technologies are vital for a 
number of companies’ core business and enablers of innovation across organizational 
departments. (Urbach et al. 2017). Matt et al. (2015) note that both product-centric and 
customer-centric business strategies that utilize digital technologies naturally cross the 
borders of a company. Digital transformation strategies take into account the changes for 
business models, products and services as a whole –going beyond the process focus. 
Furthermore, it is important to emphasize the critical role of top management support 
from the very beginning of the planning phase, as digital transformation strategies have a 
significant impact on the entire organization. The execution of these strategies may 
encounter resistance from various sectors within the company. In order to effectively 
address such resistance, transformational leadership skills are crucial. For these skills to 
be in effective use, there’s a requirement for active engagement of diverse stakeholders 
who are influenced by the transformation process. (Matt et. al 2015). 
2.2 Briefly on the human personality 
Personality traits are in other words tendencies towards a certain thought pattern, 
behaviour, emotion and reaction for stimuli received from the environment. (Fleeson, 
2001). Currently there is no universal defining theory for the human brain’s functioning, 
the field of neuroscience is rather new and emerging mostly due to the advances in the 
way we can measure activities inside the human brain. Especially the emergence of non-
invasive brain imaging techniques has led to raising popularity of the field, in addition to 
traditional psychology it is often recommended to combine biological theories and data 
from actual brain activities when studying psychological phenomena. Some 
contemporary models of human personality are based on lexical hypothesis of the human 
personality. In its core is the idea that personality traits of a group of people will 
14 
eventually be visible in the language these people use. It is a widely used approach in 
personality research, and functions as a primary methodology for the grouping and 
taxonomies of the big-five personality traits, the HEXACO model of personality and the 
16PF Questionnaire. For a time in modern age, it was though that personality is something 
rooted purely in biology and would remain unchanged over a lifespan. However, as the 
contemporary view of a human being takes into account both physiological and 
psychological aspects of human nature it is a generally accepted discourse that some 
development happens over a person’s lifetime when it comes to personality 
characteristics. It is an open debate how much of our behaviour, and even consciousness 
is deterministic. Is the universe deterministic? To some extent, sure, but honestly, we 
don’t know for sure what even is the nature of reality. In this regard, I’ve needed to make 
assumptions based on previous research.  
Human personality is known to be, at least partially rooted in genetics. According to 
Bouchard et al. (2001) approximately 50% of the five-factor model domains are 
determined by the genetic pool. Weiss et al. (2008) studied whether subjective well-being 
and personality traits share a common genetic structure. It is previously known that the 
two factors are related. They used a sample consisting of 973 twin pairs to test the 
hypothesis which stated that “heritable differences in subjective well-being are entirely 
accounted for by the genetic architecture of the Five-Factor Model's personality 
domains.” Results were in support of this hypothesis. For the FFM traits Neuroticism, 
Extraversion and Conscientiousness a unique genetic influence was found and a common 
genetic factor that affected all five personality domains. Low Neuroticism, high 
Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were all influenced by the 
same genetic factor. Common genetic factors seem to link personality traits to subjective 
well-being. Weiss and others (2008) state that “personality may form an “affective 
reserve” relevant to set-point maintenance and changes in set point over time.”, here the 
affective reserve means that certain personality types can function as an emotional reserve 
that helps people maintain consistent level of happiness through time. “Set point” refers 
to an average level of happiness for the individual person and is determined by genetics 
and environmental factors, personality traits are one of the factors affecting this “Set 
point”. (Weiss et al. 2008). When it comes to the big-five personality dimensions, 
Extraversion and Neuroticism are currently best understood concerning biological 
processes and pathways. There is good evidence that these traits in question represent 
15 
 
persons’ sensitivity to reward and sensitivity to threat and punishment. (Depue & Collins, 
1999). 
The field of study called personality neuroscience is rapidly growing, encompassing a 
range of research methods including but not limited to genetics, neuroimaging, 
psychophysiology, and psychopharmacology. In order to make sense of the increasing 
body of research in this area, it's important to have broad theoretical frameworks to 
organize the findings and make predictions. The Big Five model of personality provides 
a promising way to structure research in this field. The five factors of personality are 
strong predictors of various outcomes related to mental and physical health, well-being, 
education, work, and relationships (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). Developing a theory 
about the biological underpinnings of these traits is a crucial step in integrating research 
on individual differences across psychology and neuroscience. Findings from the study 
by DeYoung et al. (2010) support the notion that personality neuroscience can be used to 
advance our understanding of human psychology.  
2.2.1 The Big Five personality traits 
In the continuum of lexical studies starting from the 1940s by e.g. an English researcher 
Raymond Cattell (1947) that used a factor analysis to assess personality, eventually the 
big-five personality traits emerged as a concept (see Norman 1963; …) The challenge for 
the big-five model has been that the results for other languages than English have not 
been as coherent as in the original studies. The basis for my personality assessment is 
derived from the work of Goldberg (1990; 1992). The Big Five personality dimensions 
are: Extraversion, Emotional Stability (Neuroticism), Intellect / Openness to Experience, 
Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness refers to a person's level of 
reliability, organization, ambition, hard work, and perseverance. Agreeableness reflects 
an individual's inclination towards being cooperative, friendly, warm, and helpful. 
Extraversion is the inclination towards being sociable, enthusiastic, energetic, and 
optimistic. Emotional stability is the degree to which a person is calm, secure, and steady. 
Openness to experience is the inclination towards being curious, imaginative, 
sophisticated, and having their head in the clouds so to speak. (LePine et al. 2011). One 
of the strongpoints of the big-five personality type as a way of identifying one’s 
personality is the relatively stable, long-lasting nature of these characteristics. A 45-year 
longitudinal study conducted by Soldz & Vaillant (1999) concluded that three of the five 
16 
traits carry significant correlation over a long period of time. Numerous studies have 
shown that the five personality traits remain stable to a high degree when it comes to 
adulthood (Cobb-Clark & Schurer, 2012; Rantanen et al. 2007; Susan et al. 2007). The 
big-five model has been shown to predict many things ranging from career success (see: 
Barrick et al. 1998; Judge et al. 1999) to clinical conditions like depression (McCann 
2010; Koorevaar et al. 2017). 
DeYoung et al. (2010) applied a novel theory concerning the biological foundation of the 
Big Five personality traits to develop a set of hypotheses about the connection of each 
trait with various brain regions' size. After controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain 
volume, structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults provided evidence 
for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and 
Conscientiousness. Medial orbitofrontal cortex volume, a brain region involved in reward 
processing, was found to be linked with Extraversion. Brain areas linked with threat, 
punishment, and negative emotions were associated with Neuroticism. Regions of the 
brain that process information about the intentions and mental states of others were linked 
with Agreeableness. Conscientiousness was related to volume in the lateral prefrontal 
cortex, a region linked to planning and the voluntary regulation of behavior. For the 
openness / intellect trait no connection to a specific brain region was found. Intellectuality 
and intelligence is considered a really complex phenomena and the origins and reliable 
measures of intelligence are not clear, neither do they have a united discourse or a theory 
in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. There are theories like Triarchic Theory of 
Intelligence, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and Spearman’s General Intelligence 
which all have their pros and cons. These results support the biologically grounded 
explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality 
neuroscience, which is the systematic use of neuroscience methods to investigate 
individual variations in personality. DeYoung et al. (2010; 2009) have partially proven 
that there is yet much to learn about the nature of human personality and that the big five 
model seems to withstand it’s place as one of the most applicable measures of human 
personality. 
Tett et al. (1999) acknowledged in their meta-analysis that the relationship between FFM 
personality traits and job-performance is bidirectional. Bidirectional relations between 
personality and job performance imply that there might be alternative ways to interpret 
the findings of studies involving personality-job performance relations. Since previous 
17 
 
research might have overlooked this possibility, it may have led to biased interpretations 
of the results. As they have pointed out in the article, the found evidence for 
bidirectionality suggests that meta-analyses assuming unidirectionality will 
underestimate the significance of personality in predicting job performance, no matter the 
direction of the relationship. This is because true positive and negative validities can 
cancel each other out, leading to an inaccurate assessment of the overall impact of 
personality on job performance. This study points out that these complex relationships 
are both worth exploring and rather unknown. 
Gurven et al. (2012) provide the first comprehensive test of the five-factor personality 
model (FFM) in a small-scale indigenous society called the Tsimane horticulturalists of 
Bolivia. Surprisingly, they fail to robustly replicate the Big Five. They find significant 
covariance among items across the standard Big Five factors, based on two large samples 
of self- and spouse-reported personality. Tsimane personality variation may instead be 
organized along fewer and differently composed dimensions. They find evidence for a 
“Tsimane Big Two” organized according to prosociality and industriousness in the 
context of subsistence labor. Their current results require replication, with emic 
inventories and with other methods such as those based on behavioral observation or on 
peer reports by other groups than the Tsimane. However, even if other methods were to 
reveal a Big Five structure, an explanation would still be needed for why verbal reports 
do not lead to the FFM among these Tsimane, even after correction for response biases, 
but do almost everywhere else in the developed world. There are only a few exceptions 
of languages in which the five-factor model of personality has failed to reproduce all the 
personality dimensions of the big five. In Italian, the Intellect/Imagination dimension was 
not replicable in the study of the first five lexical factors, study was conducted by Di Blas 
& Forzi (1998). Also, the same factor space wasn’t found in Greek language (Saucier et 
al. 2005). Yet it is hard to tell whether these few studies would undermine the validity of 
the big-five model, it is more part of the process and helps to acknowledge that no 
theoretical model perfect and without its pros and cons. (Ashton & Lee 2007). 
18 
 
Figure 1 The Five-Factor model of personality (Goldberg 1990; 1992). 
2.2.2 HEXACO model of human personality 
The challenge for the big-five model has been that the results for other languages than 
English have not been as coherent as in the original studies. This has led to the emergence 
of a six-factor model (Ashton & Lee, 2007). Based upon the work of Goldberg and the 
big-five personality types, the HEXACO model has six dimensions instead of the five. 
This model has gained a lot of popularity in the academic research during the latest 20 
years. It builds upon the foundation of the big-five model of personality but is still 
considered an alternative to the big-five model. (Ashton & Lee, 2007). 
The HEXACO model could be a suitable model of to use in my research because it 
includes a dimension of honesty-humility. Honesty-humility is a personality trait that 
refers to an individual's tendency to be honest, sincere, and modest, and to avoid deceit 
and manipulation. This trait has been found to be associated with a number of positive 
outcomes, including greater psychological well-being, better social relationships, and 
higher levels of trust and cooperation. Perhaps, individuals who score high on this 
dimension would be more likely to perceive greater psychological safety in a changing 
environment? Discovery of the six-dimensional personality structure with extensive 
cross-cultural replicability withholds substantial implications for our comprehension of 
the nature of human personality. This finding challenges the current notion that only five 
Personality
Intellect / 
Openness to 
experience
Emotional 
Stability / 
Neuroticism
AgreeablenessExtraversion
Conscientiousness
19 
 
dimensions of personality traits would show widespread consistency across different 
cultures. (Ashton & Lee 2007). 
2.2.3 Trait activation theory 
Given that many dimensions and traits of human personality can be measured, it is 
relevant to understand how these underlying factors manifest themselves in the real world. 
Academically the idea of a human reflecting some underlying traits of personality 
differently in different situations was born in the 1930s by the works of e.g. Henry Murray 
(1938) and later developed by for example Eyesenck (1985) who said that ‘‘We can only 
measure sociability in certain types of situations, namely those involving the relatively 
free intercourse between people. … In other words, trait and situation form two sides of 
a coin that cannot be separated from each other’’ (p. 39). Kenrick and Funder (1988) state 
in their literature review that: ”Traits influence behavior only in relevant situations… 
Anxiety, for example, shows up only in situations that the person finds threatening… A 
person'straits can change a situation… For instance, an aggressive child can bring out the 
hostility in a previously peaceful playground.” (p. 29.). This claim of situations and 
personality traits acting in a symbiotic manner is backed up by decades of valid research 
and seems to hold the test of time. 
When it comes to personality traits, individuals who score high on aggression do not 
necessarily behave aggressively at all times, but only in certain situations. The concept of 
trait activation explains how personality traits are expressed based on situational cues that 
are relevant to the particular trait. This theory considers personality traits as differential 
response tendencies and links them to classic behaviourism, specifically S-R (Self-
Regulation) theory. In other words, people with high aggression levels are expected to 
respond more aggressively to aggression-inducing stimuli, and they may also respond 
more quickly or strongly to weaker cues. (Tett & Guterman 2000). 
The trait activation model by Tett and Burnett (2003) shines a spotlight on how the 
interplay between personality traits, behaviour and trait-relevant cues can be examined. 
The cues are expected to activate certain personality characteristics regarding behaviour 
that in other situations would remain latent. These cues can be found on different levels 
of interaction, more specifically at social, organizational and individual task levels. 
(LePine et al. 2011). 
20 
2.3 Psychological safety 
Psychological safety as a term was first introduced in the 1960s but the studies that have 
most relevancy in the contemporary business world have been conducted since the 1990s. 
The definition of a psychologically safe environment relates to the concept of risk-taking: 
people can be themselves without having to think that being a threat to their success in a 
workplace, they can say what they think, provide constructive feedback and feel safe to 
take risks. (Edmondson 1999). Newman et al. (2017) concluded that there is growing 
evidence to show that supporting organizational practices have an effect on employee 
work outcomes such as job performance and commitment because they heighten 
perceptions of psychological safety. 
In their literature review of 83 studies on psychological safety Newman et al. (2017) use 
a similar definition than the one created by Edmondson, a psychologically safe 
environment is one in which a person subjectively feels safe to speak up, tell their opinion, 
seek for feedback, take risks and experiment. These kinds of environments have been 
shown to cultivate the best performing teams, enable more learning and reduce errors 
made by workers in industries like aviation and healthcare. Given the nature of the 
phenomena called psychological safety I believe a good way of measuring it is on the 
individual level with interviews, unlike like the majority of literature which seeks to 
quantify the phenomena. How can one quantify a feeling or a perception of something, 
two feelings for individual persons are not the same although they would answer the same 
3/7 to a questionnaire. While the phenom of psychological safety is well-established 
among the academic literature the replicability of studies remains a challenge in this area, 
and also generally in the field of psychology (Newman et al. 2017). 
Employee voice behaviours are a part of the concept of psychological safety. It refers to 
the level of proactivity that people express in their behaviours like speaking up, coming 
up with suggestions, constructively challenging a decision or proposing a modification 
even when other might disagree. Employee voice behaviour is a form of proactive 
behaviour. (Frese & Fray, 2001). Psychological safety is pre-requisite for both promotive 
and prohibitive employee voice behaviour (Liang et al. 2012). This study focuses mainly 
on promotive employee voice behaviour since it is considered useful for a company (Van 
Dyne & LePine, 1998). 
21 
 
2.3.1 The known effects of a psychologically safe work environment 
Studies conducted by Choo et al. (2007) and Arumugam et al. (2013) both found that 
psychological safety has a positive effect on team performance, in a Six Sigma context, 
moderated by knowledge created. Choo et al. (2007) refer to learning that takes place 
during the project which in turn creates a better understanding and improves the capacities 
to operate in productive manner for the team members. In other words, the connection to 
project success seems to be there but the connection is an indirect one. They found that 
structured methods in Six Sigma projects promote learning behaviours, while 
psychological safety facilitates the creation of knowledge. Arumugam and others (2013) 
called the knowledge created “knowing-how” and psychological safety fosters creation 
of the “know-how”. Witt (2016) studied in his dissertation connections between six sigma 
project success and team members’ personalities and concluded that psychological safety 
in fact is a key factor in six sigma project success. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola 
in 1986 to enhance efficiency. Dissertation by Witt P (2016) states the following: 
“Further, in our examination of the contextual factors of Six Sigma we attempt to provide 
a unifying set of contextual factors based on the five factors studied by Nair et. al., (2011) 
(leadership engagement, strategic project selection, the use of structured methods, the use 
of improvement specialists, and the presence of psychological safety in the group).”. For 
individuals within a team, the perception of psychological safety tends to increase the 
likelihood of coming up with “work arounds” to deal with challenges at work and blocks 
in work processes. (Halbesleben & Rathert, 2008) Employee reflection on events 
happening in the workplace is also mediated by psychological safety. (Hetzner et al., 
2011). Nair et al. (2011) highlighted the crucial role of psychological safety in promoting 
cross-functional integration, regardless of the complexity and uncertainty of a project. In 
recent times, studies on Six Sigma process-improvement projects have identified key 
determinants of project success. Edmondson (1999) demonstrated that psychological 
safety positively influences SSTPP when mediated by team learning behaviours, which 
can be observed through behaviours such as seeking feedback, bold experimentation, and 
open discussion regarding errors that have been made. 
It has been found in previous research that leaders who prioritize participation, people, 
and production tend to utilize dyadic discovery methods instead of group-based methods 
for problem-solving. Additionally, they follow an improvement-oriented management 
style, which helps in creating a work environment that is psychologically safe and fosters 
22 
positive outcomes. These findings have been established by various studies, including 
Roussin (2008) and Wong et al. (2010) for the dyadic discovery methods part and 
Halbesleben & Rathert (2008) for the improvement-oriented management style part. 
Wong et al. (2010) also demonstrated that by highlighting the values of productivity, 
people, and participation a leader can play a significant role in creating a psychologically 
safe work environment. These values encourage leaders to engage in behaviors that 
promote positive relationships and offer psychological support to their team members. It 
is essential to explore how managers model and communicate these values to their team 
members, thus enabling them to feel safe and use their experiences to learn and grow. 
Carmeli (2007) suggests that via signaling team members feel safe taking risks, 
experimenting and saying their ideas out loud. Therefore, a psychologically safe 
environment will foster learning for both individuals and the team as a whole. 
Perspectives of the status characteristics theory which is a theory within the expectation 
states theory has been used to explain the effects of status on psychological safety. Status 
characteristics theory seeks to explain how beliefs about status characteristics get 
translated into performance expectations, which in turn, shape the behaviors of 
individuals in a group (Berger et al., 1977; Webster & Foschi, 1988). Studies on the 
subject have established that an individual's perceived status within a team and the 
professional status of the team itself, have a significant impact on outcomes such as 
individual willingness to voice their opinions and team engagement, ultimately leading 
to an increase in psychological safety. The research indicates that the higher the status of 
the individual or the team, the more comfortable individuals feel in expressing their 
thoughts and sharing ideas. This finding has been supported by studies conducted by 
Bienefeld & Grote (2014) on individual perceived status and Nembhard & Edmondson 
(2006) on team status. 
2.4 Personality traits in a work environment 
LePine (2003) investigated the relationship between individual personality traits and team 
performance in the context of unforeseen changes. The study used a sample of 
undergraduate student teams who participated in a simulation game that mimicked a 
military command and control team environment. The results indicated that 
conscientiousness was the only significant predictor of team performance in the face of 
change. This finding suggests that individuals with high levels of conscientiousness may 
23 
 
be better equipped to adapt to changing environments and maintain high levels of team 
performance. Witt (2016) found that psychological safety directly affected the six-sigma 
team performance and so did the big-five personality traits. He merely pointed out the 
existence of these direct relations, in addition to indirect relationship of psychological 
safety to projects success via organizational learning behaviours and knowledge created, 
but he didn’t explore these connections further. 
Leadership has a profound effect on the perceived psychological safety on an individual 
level. Characteristics of a leader such as inclusiveness, support, trustworthiness, openness 
and behavioural integrity have found to influence the experienced psychological safety 
(see. Carmeli et al. 2010; May et al. 2004; Madjar & Ortiz-Walters, 2009; Detert & Burris, 
2007) and via that the perception of a psychologically safe environment leads to increased 
engagement, involvement and better job performance. (Newman et al. 2017). 
LePine et al. (2011) explored several pathways in which team member personalities affect 
team effectiveness. What one can see from these pathways is that team member 
personality affects behaviour and behaviour directly affects the perceived psychological 
safety of an individual within a team. Team member behaviour also directly affects team 
effectiveness. Psychological safety on the other hand seems to affect effectiveness 
indirectly through learning behaviours. (See e.g. Edmondson (1999) & Newman et al. 
(2017). I have demonstrated these connections in Figure 2 which is modified from the 
LePine et al. (2011) paper’s figure and I’ve added the element of psychological safety 
and learning behaviour according to research just mentioned in the earlier paragraph. 
24 
 
Figure 2 The pathways combining personality, psychological safety and team effectiveness. 
Modified from LePine et al. (2011), Edmondson (1999) and Newman et al. (2017). 
 
Team 
memeber 
personality
Pathway B
Team 
member 
behaviour
Team 
effectiveness
Perceived 
psychologica
l safety
Learning 
behaviours
25 
 
3 Methodology 
Our minds work in a way that we try to seek explanations and see patterns around us, 
sometimes even when there are none. I decided to focus a lot on the methodology so my 
research would minimize the biases and pre-condition I as a researcher am having. I will 
disclose the reasoning behind my choices of methodology on this part of the Thesis.  
While choosing the fitting personality type test I evaluated the availability and limited 
time of the interviewed people and decided to choose the following methods from 
quantitative and qualitative paradigms for personality assessment and interviews. In this 
section I will explain the reasoning behind my choices, go through different options that 
were on the table for conducting my research and finally explain the unique characteristics 
of my chosen methodology. I will also disclose the tools used for data analysis in this 
section. 
Because the environment consisting of teams that work in different enterprises is so 
complex, it would make sense to avoid simplistic studies of a few variables to address 
phenomena like personality and psychological safety. In quantitative studies it is often 
hard to control a lot of variables and hypotheses, I have chosen to use mostly qualitative 
methods in addition to the traditionally used quantitative ones. In this way, overlooking 
potentially significant contributing or mediating factors could be avoided. (Mathieu et al. 
2008). Most quantitative research tries to point out cause- and effect relationships, make 
predictions based on these relationships and generalize it to a broader sample. (Hasim & 
Antwi, 2015). Psychological safety is totally based on the experience of the individual, 
and for that purpose qualitative methods are more suitable. In my context this means 
interviewing people about their past experiences and analyzing the meaning different 
people with varying profiles of personality dimensions give to these experiences. 
Personality traits on the other hand, cannot be assessed efficiently without a questionnaire 
and that falls into the category of a quantitative method in research. 
Qualitative research methods, such as interviews, focus groups, and observation, can be 
useful for exploring and understanding people's experiences, perspectives, and beliefs in 
depth. More precisely, for a qualitative study on this topic, my plan is to gather data by 
conducting in-depth interviews with employees who have undergone digital business 
transformation projects in their workplace. Before the interviews, I plan to use a 
questionnaire for defining the employee’s personality type. Later on, I will focus on in-
26 
depth conversation concerning their perception of psychological safety during the 
transformation process, and their experiences with change management practices both as 
a driver and a subject of change. Using a mixed-methods approach allows for a more 
comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how employees' personality types affect 
the perceived psychological safety in the context of digital business transformation 
projects. It allows for the collection of both numerical data and more detailed, in-depth 
insights which are needed to answer my research questions and for providing a well-
rounded picture of the topic at hand. Taking all this complexity into account, I’m going 
to be able to address my research questions. 
Overall, after a rigorous pre-planning grounded in the the body of research from Eriksson 
& Kovalainen (2016), Järvinen (2021) and Antwi et al. (2015), literature seems to point 
out that the qualitative approach is indeed a suitable way to explore and understand the 
complex and nuanced relationship between personality, psychological safety, and change 
management in the context of digital business transformation projects. It could also 
provide valuable insights for organizations and their managers seeking to improve 
psychological safety and manage change more effectively. Based on the data I’m going 
to collect, I shall analyze the themes and patterns that emerge and use these to develop 
insights and conclusions about the relationship between the abovementioned factors. 
3.1 On qualitative research methods 
3.1.1 Action research 
In research, action research is considered as a suitable approach when the research 
objective involves describing a series of actions that are occurring over time in a particular 
group, organization, or community. It is also appropriate when the objective is to 
comprehend the process of change, development, or resolution of a real problem. By 
applying action research, one can learn from the situation and develop solutions for it. 
Furthermore, the differences between a researcher and a management consultant often 
lessen or disappear as academic research aims to understand the practical issues related 
to business operations and implement change processes and solutions. The researcher is 
expected to be somewhat involved in the activities they are researching. (Eriksson & 
Kovalainen, 2011). Action research stems from the field of social psychology which is 
close to the context of this study. As a qualitative research method for business, it is 
27 
 
widely adapted and used. Action research leans closer to the paradigm of realism than 
consctructive knowledge creation, which again would be in line with the aims of this 
study to contribute to effective change management. Action research is particularly 
beneficial when investigating issues related to processes within organizations, such as 
learning and change. (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2011). 
While action researched sounded like a suitable method for my thesis, I’m not actively 
involved in a project that would have a specific goal of enhancing psychological safety 
with different methods, in my opinion action research is not suitable as a method for 
answering my research questions. There is not currently an underlying problem in a 
digital transformation project that I ought to solve with this thesis, the main goal of the 
thesis is to gain valuable insight on the relationships between personality traits and 
perceived psychological safety and hopefully offer practical guidance for managers on 
how to address these relationships at work. 
3.1.2 Interviews 
According to Eriksson and Kovalainen (2016) structured and standardized interviews are 
particularly useful when the interviewer is inexperienced and there is scarce amount of 
money or time to be spent on the research – all of these aspects are relevant to my thesis. 
Thematic analysis is a foundational method in the core of qualitative research. It is also a 
suitable method to use both in the fields of psychology and business research. (Eriksson 
& Kovalainen, 2016; Braun & Clarke, 2006). According to the typology created by 
Silverman (2013) there are three different kind of interview studies: positivist, 
constructivist and emotionalist / subjectivist. The kind of interviews suitable for my 
research land on the category on an ‘Subjectivist’ interview study in which the focus is 
on people’s perceptions, emotions understandings and conceptions about different 
phenomena. An example study from the book of Eriksson and Kovalainen (2016, p. 92) 
utilizing this type of interview was “studying the process of organizational change”. One 
rule of thumb I followed while inventing the interview questions was that the interviewees 
are not able to answer my research questions directly, this sounds obvious but sometimes 
the basics are important to keep in mind while creating a research setting. The book gives 
guidance on how to conduct interviews. It helps a researcher to design, conduct and 
analyze qualitative interviews in a systematic and rigorous manner. It includes tips on 
28 
preparing for interviews, selecting participants, creating interview guides, and recording 
and transcribing interview data. 
The book also covers various aspects of working with qualitative data, including how to 
manage large amounts of qualitative data, how to code and categorize data, and how to 
use various software tools to analyse qualitative data. According to the authors combining 
heterogenous data from various sources is considered to be the best approach when 
conducting research, this principle is called triangulation. Realistically this isn’t always 
an applicable approach but rather an ideal. By taking into account many perspectives and 
utilizing various methods the researcher, or a student doing their thesis, can try to increase 
the validity and reliability of their findings. 
3.2 Choosing the personality trait assessment 
3.2.1 Scientific validity as an arising challenge 
Two key challenges in choosing the personality assessment were that most questionnaires 
are not open to public, and many are debated in terms of validity in the scientific 
community. Many “popular science” books about personality, like Iditos around me by 
Thomas Erikson, don’t really have a solid academic justification and are widely criticized 
despite of their popularity. They are either described vaguely in research papers or behind 
a paid subscription.  I do not have the competence myself to come up with a lexical 
identifier questionnaire for human personality so I have to rely on ready-made tests. My 
goal was to find a ready-made easy-to-use version of a questionnaire that would help me 
identify how do the participants score in different domains of the big five factors. If I 
were to solely focus on the assessment of personality it would make sense to combine 
both self-report and observer methods of data collection but since the purpose of 
determining the personality traits is to support the qualitative analysis of the interview 
data, self-report measures are sufficient. 
First when searching for suitable personality assessment I came across a Myers-Briggs 
type indicator (MBTI) test. For MBTI test the challenge is that the questionnaire takes 
time, this would have made my data gathering difficult with a constraint of time and the 
fact that personality assessment is only a part of my data gathering. For academic 
purposes the MBTI test had a few flaws to consider, by googling “scientific validity of 
the MBTI test” I found numerous articles on whether the test is considered pseudoscience 
29 
 
or science. Some like The Guardian (2013) point-out that there are clear scientific gaps 
for the reliability of this indicator. Also, Wikipedia has a section acknowledging that there 
is a wide criticism for this indicator despite its wide adoption in the corporate world. For 
these reasons I decided not to use MBTI in my research. 
Another option would be to use the big-five personality traits assessment. The basis for 
my questionnaire could be derived from the work of Goldberg (1992). The next question 
arising was how am I going to evaluate the big-five personality traits? At truity.com one 
can evaluate their personality according to the big-five model. They’ve done the test with 
60 questions and 5-10min completion time which I find very optimistic. One assessment 
I thought I could use for my research is used by DeYoung et al. 2010: “We administered 
the self-report version of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & 
McCrae, 1992) to assess the Big Five personality factors.” This test consisted of 120 
statements. All in all, with these scales and measures of the big-five personality traits, 
there is a significant time constraint, in the context of my research a quicker yet reliable 
measure of personality dimensions would be preferred. Most of the focus of my 
interviewees should be on the interviews rather than on the personality test. While doing 
more searches on personality assessment I found the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. 
Based on the theory of Hans Eysenck who focused on temperament and genetic, inherited 
aspects of human personality. There has been a significant critique towards this model 
and therefore, being as controversial as it is, I decided not to move forward with this 
questionnaire method. (Mor 2010). 
Majority of the research concerning the HEXACO -model of personality seems to be led 
by two main researchers in the field Michael C. Ashton and Kibeom Lee. This could be 
a challenge for the reliability of the model. However, the articles they’ve produced are 
published in quality journals if one can rely on julkaisufoorumi.fi. The model builds upon 
widely known big-five-factor model but is still considered an alternative. Given these 
circumstances I believe choosing the more widely adapted and tested model of personality 
would be a better option for my thesis research. There is still a chance that the HEXACO 
model proves to be better in almost all predictions and modelling, but currently there is 
no broad evidence to suggest that. 
30 
3.2.2 International Personality Item Pool 
IPIP stands for International Personality Item Pool and it consists of several thousand 
lexical items. The pool doesn’t refer to any specific measure of personality but is a 
repository from which different scales like “the 50-item IPIP representation of the 
Goldberg (1992) markers for the Big-Five factor structure” can be derived from. Some 
scales are named by the creator and in those cases that particular naming is preferred 
when the scale is used, for example “IPIP-120-NEO” scale (Johnson, 2014). I will derive 
the questionnaire from IPIP also known as International Personality Item Pool 
(IPIP.ori.org) which is based on the article “The development of markers for the Big-Five 
factor structure.” by Goldberg (1992). 
A study conducted by Cooper at al. (2010) highlights the Mini-IPIP personality scale as 
a suitable short-form measure of the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, also known 
as the Big-Five. The study points out that the Mini-IPIP can be useful in situations where 
there are time constraints or other limitations that allow only a limited number of 
measures to be used. This is exactly the kind of measure I was looking for. The study 
finds that the Mini-IPIP has an acceptable level of reliability and a well-defined factor 
structure, supporting previous results provided by Donnellan et al. (2006). It is worth 
mentioning that the current Cooper et al. (2010) study administered only the 20 items of 
the Mini-IPIP, whereas Donnellan et al. (2006) extracted the subset of items post hoc 
from a larger set of items. The participant pool of the study comprised of predominantly 
female and highly educated students. Demographics of the participants of my research 
study are also highly educated and mostly female. (Cooper et al. 2010). Both of these 
measures are based on the work of Goldberg (1992; 1999). Donnellan et al. (2006) 
however, chose to score the measure of Emotional Stability in reverse and use 
Neuroticism instead, this differs from the original type of measurement. I’m going to use 
Neuroticism as one dimension too, since the Mini-IPIP scale is validated and tested 
including this change in the scoring and I dare not to modify it in order to maintain the 
scientific validity of the measure. 
The IPIP (International Personality Item Pool) scales are a set of self-report measures of 
personality, basically they are statements that the answerer needs to assess how accurately 
they match their own personality. I have listed some of the advantages and disadvantages 
regarding the use of the IPIP scales in my research. IPIP as a foundation for research is 
31 
 
widely used, IPIP scales are one of the most cited measures of personality and have been 
tested for reliability and validity in numerous studies. (See e.g. Donnellan et al. 2006; 
Cooper at al. 2010; Goldberg 1999; Johnson 2014) The IPIP scales are freely available to 
use, which in the context of my thesis is very important. Tools like Google Forms make 
it easy to create questionnaire forms and are by nature time-efficient to analyze, in other 
words they are simple to create and use. The large pool of items and wide research usage 
makes choosing the questionnaire questions easier. The IPIP scales consist of a large pool 
of items that can be used to assess different aspects of personality, such as extraversion, 
agreeableness, and conscientiousness – all of which are relevant for my research. 
There are also some disadvantages for using the IPIP scales as there are in all self-report 
measures. The self-report bias is a part of the challenge when people might tend to not 
describe themselves accurately. They might have distorted picture of themselves that 
others would not agree with, so what then is truly representing the human personality? 
Overall, the psychological theories of human personality are an evolving field and have 
started only recently to integrate with the fields of molecular biology and neuroscience. 
While most of the studies regarding the big-five personality types are based on a pool of 
representing Western culture, so is mine, and I don’t find that tampering with the validity 
and suitability of the measure. If I were to conduct a similar study in e.g. Sudan, it might 
be a challenge to apply the standard items for my research interviewees. 
I am going to utilize a mini-IPIP questionnaire I found was tested in a research study “A 
confirmatory factor analysis of the Mini-IPIP five-factor model personality scale” by 
Andrew Cooper et al. (2010) with the tool Google Forms. The questions are based on the 
IPIP standard 50-question questionnaire (IPIP.ori.org). The use of a shortened 20-
question has been also validated by Donnella et al. (2006) who evaluated a series of 
studies to assess the Mini-IPIP measure and found that it had adequate reliability and 
demonstrated comparable patterns of associations with the longer IPIP-FFM measure. 
Specifically, the Mini-IPIP measure showed similar correlations with facets of the Five-
Factor Model and other pertinent measures of personality. Basically, for each category of 
the big-five four items are chosen instead of the ten that was originally planned. Due to 
the time constraint of my interviewees and myself, I believe choosing this shortened 
version is the best way to approach the personality assessment part of my research. To 
sum it up, the mini-IPIP standard questionnaire for assessing the big-five personality 
32 
dimensions is time-efficient and reliable and therefore was chosen to be part of the 
research methodology. 
Scoring instructions for the mini-IPIP can be found online with a free access from the 
IPIP website (see IPIP.ori.org). Exactly the same questionnaire and invitation message 
was used with all the participants in order to minimize unnecessary third-party variables 
from affecting the results. 
From the website of scoring instructions on the mini-IPIP there was a note that “The 
authors of the Mini-IPIP chose to score the Emotional Stability scale from the lexical Big 
Five in reverse and to use the label Neuroticism  from the Five-Factor Model for this scale. 
The current consensus is that Emotional Stability and Neuroticism are opposite ends of 
the same dimension, or nearly so. Again, should one decide to use the Mini-IPIP in 
research, one should be aware that Donnellan, et al.'s (2006) scoring and 
conceptualization of this factor differ from that of the original IPIP scale on which it was 
based.” I have taken this part into account for my questionnaire. Donnellan et al. (2006) 
tested the validity of the mini-IPIP measure of personality and results across five different 
studies indicated that the Mini-IPIP is a psychometrically acceptable and practically 
useful measure of the Big Five factors of personality. 
3.2.3 Data security and confidentiality 
It's important to take appropriate measures to ensure the confidentiality, anonymity, and 
security of the data collected through my IPIP survey and 1on1 interviews in order to 
protect the privacy of the participants. I believe telling the participants how their data is 
going to be used and that the answers are anonymous are essentials for both ethical 
research and a successful interview. I have chosen to address these aspects of research 
the following way: 
• Confidentiality: No one else except for the author and upon request the university 
thesis supervisor will be able to access the data I’ve collected. The data will be 
stored in highly secure cloud storage platforms of Apple and Google; the iCloud 
Drive and Google Drive. No other encryption will be needed. 
33 
 
• Anonymity: I will create and use a unique identifier to identify my interviewees’ 
answers about their personality traits and interview questions. No real names are 
needed to be used publicly anywhere. 
• Data security: In the accounts that are used to store the data there is a 2-factor 
authentication in place. The hardware devices used to handle the research data are 
Apple’s MacBook computers with the latest software updates in place that have a 
built-in firewall and anti-virus software called XProtect. 
According to the following statement from the Finnish government the nature of my 
research data is pseudonymized: “The encoding of personal data is an example of 
pseudonymisation. Encoded data cannot be connected to a specific individual without a 
code key. For the holder of the code key, however, decoding the records and identifying 
each data subject remains a simple task. Personal data can also be protected with false 
names. For example, a data item related to the individual can be replaced with another in 
a database. Pseudonymisation is a commonly employed method in research and 
statistics.” (tietosuoja.fi). I have created a six-character long random identifier with 
Excel’s “RANDBETWEEN” function for the participant of the research study. The file 
connecting the identifier and the person’s name is stored offline to researcher’s computer 
behind two-factor authentication, password and firewall protection. 
This guideline from the university has been followed for the survey part of the Thesis 
“Carry out the research surveys without identification data  (name, address etc.) 
whenever these are not essential for conducting the survey. The appropriate procedure is 
to, for example, send a survey request to a person's email but responding to the survey 
itself would happen anonymously in e.g. Webropol.”. (University of Turku / Intranet).  
3.3 Interview structure 
3.3.1 Selection of the interviewed professionals. 
I am utilizing the professional network I have gathered during my time working with 
colleagues and clients in a large U.S. based consulting corporation that has approximately 
300 000 employees. The profile of the interviewed people is determined by the 
requirement of having worked in a large-scale technology transformation project. For 
34 
example, an ERP vendor / system change. Questions that guided me through my selection 
of the interviewed people:   
• Who has deep knowledge of issues related to my research question? 
• Do I want to control some background variables regarding informants, that can 
affect their answers? 
• Would I like to use a snowball technique, to find more informants during the data 
collection process? 
• For document analysis: what kind of metadata should I collect from documents, 
to understand for example, who wrote it, when, and for what purpose. 
I decided that people with relevant experience can be found through teams and function 
I’m either working in or closely with. I went through the country + EMEA company 
structure and name list found online from the intranet and decided to approach 
professionals from different focus areas like technical consulting and change management 
functions. Over half of the people I interviewed I hadn’t met before. The ratio of men to 
women was 3 men to 10 women in the sample. For the metadata part I don’t need any 
special metadata because I’m not conducting document analysis but focusing on the data 
gathered. I do have an Excel file for scoring the personality trait assessment so that can 
be considered metadata. 
3.3.2 The interview questions 
I have chosen to have fixed interview questions and the type of the interview will be semi-
structured. I will give myself the freedom to ask additional questions if something of 
interest arises in the dialogue during an interview but the basis of the interview will be 
the same for all participants. (See Appendix. 1). Since my focus is on the individual level 
rather than on the team experience of psychological safety, I do not see why group 
interviews would be preferred over individual interviews in this thesis. The interview 
meeting will be held by the interviewer and for one interviewee at a time.  
As a basis on how to evaluate the perceptions of psychological safety I have used the 
definition of psychological safety and numerous previous studies to come up with 
interview questions that would be successful in exploring the relationship between 
different dimensions of personality and the perception of psychological safety. I found 
35 
 
the following questionnaire used by an HR organization. For example, these exemplary 
questions have helped me to create my own interview questions: 
1. Are people at this organization able to bring up problems and tough issues. 
2. Do you feel safe to take a risk in this organization. 
3. Is it difficult to ask other members of this organization for help. 
The scientific validity of this test isn’t relevant. It was used as an example in a blog at 
predictiveindex.com. From my research’s point of view, it is important to distinct that 
I’m not trying to measure the level of psychological safety itself in a team but rather the 
perceptions of its existence, and the variety of these experiences per an individual and 
their personality dimensions. 
For the questions I ended up using in my research I combined examples from e.g. the 
work of Amy Edmondson (1999; 2006; 2014) and her TedxTalk. I incorporated aspects 
of the big-five personality traits into some of these interview questions, there are good 
descriptions of each personality trait available online and in the works mentioned in the 
literature review. An example question from the interviews: “Do you usually feel like you 
can ask what the goal of a task or a project is, without the risk of sounding like you’re the 
only one out of the loop?”. Structurally I went from general and easy questions like 
background and education towards more specific questions like: “Can you describe a time 
at work when you felt particularly safe and supported psychologically? Why?” to more 
broad questions in the end: “Overall, in your opinion, how important is acknowledgement 
of personalities and psychological safety for the success of a digital business 
transformation project?”. The full list of interview questions can be found from the 
Appendices section. My goal is to generate a robust thematic analysis narrative that 
captures the richness and complexity of participants' experiences and perspectives on the 
interplay between personality traits and psychological safety in large-scale business 
transformation projects like ERP change. 
36 
4 Data analysis and results 
This section of the thesis will showcase the key findings and describe the process of data 
analysis. I used the NVivo tool for the data analysis. The personality assessment results I 
calculated in Microsoft Excel. The calculations were fairly simple plus-minus 
calculations based on the IPIP scale instructions. I created transcripts from the interviews 
I held and used thematic analysis to find different themes through coding the data. The 
personality trait assessment helped me in this coding process and offered insight into 
whether people who possess certain traits seemed to perceive psychological safety in 
particular ways. I focused on what fascinating, or not-surprising, insights would arise 
from the interviews. Thematic analysis is a foundational method in the core of qualitative 
research. (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2016; Braun & Clarke, 2006). 
After I had conducted the interviews I transcribed the data that was in both audio and 
video format using the NVivo tool. By reading through the interviews, I identified codes 
along the way – these codes were eventually grouped together and used to create 
emerging themes from the interview data. Themes are patterns found in the data that can 
form a valid narrative about the research (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2016). As a process 
my data analysis was iterative, revising, reviewing and going back on the identified codes 
and themes was central to my analysis process. One of the key challenges in the process 
was to create themes that are distinct enough from one another. In this section I will 
disclose the key findings of the coding process. 
4.1 Coding of the interviews and personality assessments 
The initial round of coding the transcribed interview data was done manually in nVivo 
software by reading through the interviews and highlighting relevant points bearing my 
research questions in mind. I started with simple labelling of personality dimensions of 
the interviewees to relevant answers from the interviews: examples of codes used: “High 
Agreeableness” and “Low Neuroticism” for codes of personality and “Reaction to 
change” and “Doing mistakes” for the interview question answers. Personality 
assessments of the big-five personality traits functioned as starting data points and labels 
for the coding process. With the tool nVivo there are good options to use like queries to 
find common patterns and compare all the interview codes between one another. Below 
you can find a full list of initial codes, reference amounts used to start the interview 
37 
 
analysis. In this section I will back up my findings and claims with “quotes” from the 
interview transcripts. 
Code name Description Files References 
Background - Education Professional and educational backgrounds 7 12 
Communication Preferred types of communication / people 
& organizational levels  
6 22 
Confidence level How employees are feeling about 
themselves in a fast-paced environment 
4 5 
Employee voice 
behaviours 
Employee voice behaviour – shows the 
presence of psychological safety in 
behaviour 
6 18 
High Agreeableness Personality trait of the big-five model 6 42 
High Conscientiousness Personality trait of the big-five model 7 17 
High Extraversion Personality trait of the big-five model 2 12 
High intellect - 
imagination 
Personality trait of the big-five model 2 8 
High neuroticism Personality trait of the big-five model 3 12 
Importance of the studied 
phenomena 
Links to projects success, do the topics 
matter? 
5 9 
Low extraversion Personality trait of the big-five model 2 4 
Low Intellect - 
Imagination 
Personality trait of the big-five model 1 2 
Low Neuroticism Personality trait of the big-five model 3 3 
Managerial advice Any advice for managers on the interview 
topic 
5 13 
Mistakes Everything related to making mistakes, 
feelings and reactions. 
8 15 
Psychological safety Answer that relate to the concept of 
psychological safety 
7 37 
Reaction to change Descriptions of experiences with both 
driving change and being a subject to 
change 
8 15 
Support What people have felt that brings them 
psychological safety 
7 27 
Table 1 Interview coding as a starting point for thematic analysis. 
38 
4.2 Emerging themes 
4.2.1 Employee voice behaviours 
An interesting notion regarding employee voice behaviours was that at the client site, 
some consultants didn’t question things in meetings as much and told that they 
emotionally supress their reactions at least when it comes to behaviour (you can’t silence 
feelings easily). 
“when you're working with a client I feel like then you have to be the one who is more 
like secure and you're reassuring others about the change, so you have to be more 
confident about it. And when it's happening to you I think you're not expected to be calm 
every time so … you can freak out a bit more than if you're in the driving seat” 
In the driver’s seat of change management, extraversion as a personality trait plays a role 
in employee voice behaviours. There’s a chance that creating the facilities for 
communication and holding team meetings wouldn’t come as easy to people that would 
score low on Extraversion. Those who reported being vocal and speaking up in meetings 
scored relatively high on Extraversion, this is just an observation, but causality cannot be 
determined from the observation. This could be due to high psychological safety in the 
team or being extraverted or explained by a third variable. 
“we said it out loud that we didn't feel very comfortable, then we tried to force more 
team interaction, so for example instead of having only once a week a team meeting we 
had it twice and we asked questions like: "Who can you thank you from the team what 
happened that changed your week, anything good that you want to share or just 
anything fun that happened that made you smile" something like that. At the beginning 
people were very hesitant but then they started to improve.” 
“I am usually the type of a person who speaks out concerns, so if there are problems or 
viewpoints that I feel have been neglected” 
An interviewee scoring low on Extraversion told a story about workshops and how 
speaking equal amounts and making sure everyone is heard is facilitated, remember the 
internal Google study from chapter 1.1 about “equality in distribution of conversational 
turn-taking”. Writing things down together, having a pause in a meeting with some time 
39 
 
to fill-in a Mural for example should enable both extraverted and introverted people to 
get their voices heard. 
“writing down kind of makes the situation more equal even though I'm not the most 
quietest person but I still think that it's nice for everyone to be able to participate and 
not only those persons who are louder than others” 
People who scored high on Neuroticism also reported being a bit worried about change 
and their reaction seems to have a negative connotation. This particular interviewee 
showed remarkable self-awareness and emotional intelligence in acknowledging her own 
natural tendency for reacting to change by navigating the highly neurotic personality with 
self-awareness. 
“I'm really aware that I always have like negative attitudes towards change, and I also 
think that's why I really like doing this change management parts because I truly 
understand why people don't like it because I don't like it myself.” 
In general, if people have been given clear goals and structure for their work the employee 
voice behaviours are vocal, an interviewed management consultant answered on the topic 
of challenging the status quo in meetings and in project as follows: 
“I don't have any problems, I mean if we are not aligned in why we're doing or where 
we're at, how can you perform? So I really don't have any problems in that and I also 
have no problems in questioning.” 
One question I had was on how comfortable the interviewed people are making mistakes 
in their (project) work and how they feel if they’ve done a mistake. There were examples 
of different team environments regarding the level of psychological safety that offered 
me an insight on how people are feeling in different settings. 
“the project manager who's really like a micromanager, so people are really afraid of 
making mistakes and the result of that is just that they don't like confess that they have 
made mistakes” 
“there was really not a good environment and when I joined I could really feel there 
was not a nice vibe with the people so nobody really asked any question” 
40 
This relates to psychological safety, are people willing to admit mistakes that have 
happened or afraid of doing them in the first place? Another interviewee elaborated on 
our in-head perceptions and reactions to making mistakes in a way that phrases the 
paradoxical nature of our teamwork and communication. An individual scoring high on 
Agreeableness should according to the explanation of the Big-Five incline towards being 
cooperative, friendly, warm, and helpful and this is reflected on the below quote as well. 
They would never treat a colleague who does a mistake in a malicious way yet there’s a 
bit of fear in the back of a mind that someone would do it to them. 
““I think it's always so fascinating how you would never respond in any negative way 
towards a colleague about the mistake right? But then you think that the colleague 
would do it towards you, so it's a bit funny how our mind works” 
4.2.2 Self-criticism 
Self-criticism was a theme emerging in the interviews, many people who are career-
driven seem to be hard critiques of themselves. It might be that if a team lacks 
psychological safety people are even harder on themselves for doing mistakes and it might 
be easier to let go and focus on problem-solving and future when there is no culture of 
pointing fingers and blaming people but rather a solution-oriented mindset in the team 
they’re working in. 
“I can be very critical if I make a mistake” 
Agreaable individuals might find it hard to deal with making mistakes because in the heart 
of it, a mistake rattles social cohesion. One interviewee scoring high on Agreeableness 
told how a mistake he made early in his career shook him. 
“I tried everything to make it correct and maybe try to learn from them avoid it in the 
future” 
Another interviewee with a dominant Agreeableness trait told that they find it hard to let 
go when they’ve done a mistake.  
“also things that seem pretty minor still stick to my mind even after years I still 
remember that one e-mail that was supposed to go to the whole team and then I forgot 
one team member” 
41 
 
How to cope with the issue? There seemed to be at least two ways to deal better with 
making mistakes. The interviewed people thought that leading by example is the best way 
to show what you can do in a team and what not. If the manager him/herself admits 
mistakes with a solution-oriented mindset and show example it will encourage others to 
do so as well and eventually contribute to a greater level of psychological safety. 
“I think that it's really important that for example the project manager or the people in 
the top they kind of walk the talk so they admit when they have made mistakes and I 
think that's really important because it will affect the whole team and it will like start 
the good culture” 
Another way to overcome the self-criticism is working on an individual level and 
developing as a professional through reflection and self-awareness. People who score 
high on Conscientiousness might find it especially difficult to silence the critical voices 
in their head – but luckily, one doesn’t need to silence anything, thoughts cannot really 
be supressed in healthy manner so instead, an employee should acknowledge the arising 
criticism rather than try to silence it. 
“I try to learn how to apply more empathy towards myself.” 
4.2.3 Managerial advice for fostering psychological safety 
This might sound obvious but from the interviews a common theme arose that by 
genuinely caring about your team members, also a bit outside of work context, really 
makes a difference to their perception of psychological safety. Leading with empathy 
seems to have real value in the minds of employees. One-on-one meetings without 
specific agendas were seen as valuable for checking in on each other's well-being. The 
interviewees also suggested informal gatherings like coffee breaks as opportunities to 
connect and relieve stress. Checking in on personal level whether you’re a team member 
or a leader on workload, mood etc. has a crucial role. In addition, positive feedback loops 
engaged employees which in turn is according to literature one of the key success factors 
in successful digital business transformation. Following examples are from when asked 
specific types of communication and support that the employees find useful during 
stressful times at work. 
“When you like one-on-one check in with them, I feel that it's going to be an important 
factor for psychological safety” 
42 
“I think it's really nice when someone else asks you like "hey are you OK with your 
workload, just double checking" you know, or just asking how are you doing 
generally.” 
“reassurance that you're doing a good job and reassurance we're all in this together 
asking for help and knowing that the help will be there” 
One of the interviewed people pointed out that there is a fine line for managers to what 
extent they can focus on individuals’ hopes, dreams and fears because at the end of the 
day, there is still a lot of work to be done. This is true, it might happen that in a very 
psychologically safe and inclusive team people bring too much of their burdens to work 
– the point for a (project) manager is not to be a therapist but to focus on work outcomes. 
The positioning of this fine line has been evolving over the past decades. We have come 
from not disclosing almost any private matters at work to nowadays being recognized as 
humans whose work is a part of their life as a whole, this is the norm in the Nordic 
countries at least. In addition to the forementioned, one individual pointed out that there’s 
probably no universal truth or quick fix on which style of communication is the best to 
facilitate psychological support since we’re all different in our personalities despite the 
models and labels. Nevertheless, if there are no efforts put to communication, support and 
fostering psychological safety digital business transformation efforts might lose steam in 
the minds of employees as Kumar Basu (2015) suggested. 
“I mean that if you have a problem going on you should do your own work with the 
therapist whatever but work is work in my opinion, so you want to keep it separate. 
Then, if the condition of the team do not give you psychological safety or something that 
is within the team that everyone together sort of feel the same about an issue, then it's a 
thing that you need to acknowledge absolutely.” 
“I feel that everyone is dealing with stress differently and as let's say project lead you 
need to be able to know your team members and know like how a few of your members 
deal with stress and if, for example, I know that Matias deals with stress by running, he 
can go and run.” 
Managerial skills in successful digital business transformation projects are not 
highlighted without a reason (see. The New York Times, 2016; McKinsey 2017). The 
43 
 
themes arising from interviews back this up. Some interviewees felt that “knowing your 
people” and their personal preferences are essential for effective leadership. 
There’s a clear link to previous literature in what people reported in my research data 
about management style that contributes to the perception of a psychologically safe team. 
It is known that leadership has a profound effect on the perceived psychological safety 
on an individual level. I previously disclosed that characteristics of a leader such as 
inclusiveness, support, trustworthiness, openness and behavioural integrity have found to 
influence the experienced psychological safety (see. Carmeli et al. 2010; May et al. 2004; 
Madjar & Ortiz-Walters, 2009; Detert & Burris, 2007) and via that the perception of a 
psychologically safe environment leads to increased engagement, involvement and better 
job performance. (Newman et al. 2017). I would highlight that for managerial support 
especially one-to-one connection was seen as an important factor, inclusiveness from the 
literature can be interpreted as the importance of welcoming everyone’s ideas that was 
emphasized in the interviews. From the data it’s clear that also openness and behavioural 
integrity matter significantly. When asked what can we do to one another to enhance the 
perception of psychological safety in a team, both honesty and transparency were 
highlighted the former can be interpreted as behavioural integrity and the latter as 
openness. 
“be honest and transparent with your team” 
Behaviours and leadership that lead to higher levels of psychological safety across all 
personality dimensions in the scope of this research are somewhat difficult to obtain. 
Simply telling people they can “be themselves” or “express any ideas freely” isn’t enough 
but these principles have to be acted upon on a continuous day-to-day basis. Skills of 
emotional intelligence and empathy should be highlighted in talent acquisition in order to 
hire people that more naturally facilitate a psychologically safe environment at work 
because that is what drives the most successful teams and enables project success in its 
own part. 
4.2.4 Online vs Offline interactions 
For one-to-one interactions with the managers and giving shoutouts in an online work 
environment this behaviour needs to have more structure. The time for feedback, having 
a 1on1 or reflection needs to be scheduled more often the interviewers experience. While 
44 
working on-site the feedback can be a smile, a pat on the shoulder that is completely not 
planned or unexpected, but in the online workplace people don’t bump into each other by 
accident and share anything if there is no dedicated timeslot from the calendar for that 
kind of behaviour. Another interviewee also elaborated on the frequency of support and 
checking in, we as humans have a certain baseline of interaction needs and it differs per 
individual. Regardless, it seems that in a team environment that’s mostly online one 
would need support more frequently. 
“I think you need it to be more like scheduled when you work online, it has to be a 
dedicated time slot because I think that when you work physically, I'm just assuming 
because I've never had proper on-site work, but I would assume there you have a 
quicker way of just reacting and responding when someone does a good job with your 
smile with the pat on the shoulder and there's it's easier to give that shoutout with other 
ways than just verbally. And when you're online I feel like you need a dedicated time 
slot and people sometimes need those deadlines for feedback” 
“I think maybe online you would actually need support more, like more frequently 
because I think when you're face to face then you can maybe already sort of be hinted 
out if a person seems like he's having a lot” 
Some interviewees didn’t have a preference or weren’t aware of any preference regarding 
whether they find digital interaction different from F2F interaction. In this regard, the 
research offers no advice on which would be a preferred way of communicating for 
everyone, again, no quick fixes or magical formulas although most of us would love to 
have them wouldn’t we. 
“I don't really have a specific preference if it's one-on-one, even slack is good because 
then I can just reach out to you” 
 
 
45 
 
5 Conclusions and discussion 
Findings from the research on what makes a team great conducted by Google (The New 
York Times, 2016) and McKinsey (2017;2021) share the same key factors and ideas that 
were mentioned in the interviews: having good emotional intelligence, showing empathy, 
setting up clear goals, giving everyone an equal amount of time and freedom to speak up 
and raise their concerns. 
Most findings of this study are also aligned with the other contemporary scientific beliefs. 
For example, people scoring high on extraversion were not hesitant in voicing their 
opinions and asking questions, they were more confident in their employee voice 
behaviour which can be due to established psychological safety or the personality 
dimension. Also, the fact that according to the interviewees, psychological safety and 
acknowledgment of personality traits mattered as concepts when considering the success 
of a digital business transformation project. Yet reality at work related to communication, 
management style and trust seems to be often different, even though we know that it is 
effective to have psychological safety in a team and encourage people to voice their 
opinions, there is a gap between what we know and how we behave as communities. The 
cultural gap of “old-school” managers and modern management is significant. One of the 
reasons why psychological safety and the areas focusing on individuals has thrived in 
research only after the 90s could well be that we as generations have changed and that 
has led to the scientific findings being more relevant and new style of management to be 
more effective. It might be possible that having psychological safety in the team would 
not have been as efficient in the 1970s. 
Agreeable individuals were found to be profoundly impacted by the mistakes they had 
made in previous projects. However, they were harsh on themselves rather than afraid of 
someone in the team punishing or ashaming them – in other words they were themselves 
the hardest critiques of the mistake rather than afraid of external reactions. The agreeable 
individuals I interviewd had realized that everybody makes mistakes sometimes and the 
team environment allowed for consultants to be human too. The connection between self-
criticism and psychological safety is an interesting one because taking the theoretical 
background of trait-activation theory into account some traits only express themselves 
(strongly) in certain situations and it could be that a lack of psychological safety creates 
46 
harder self-criticism especially for Agreeable individuals. These findings are gathered for 
conceptualization’s sake to Figure 3. 
 
Figure 3 The big-five personality traits and psychological safety in the context of digital business 
transformations 
The nature of large-scale technology projects is complex and impossible to plan 
everything beforehand. There is a great need for adaptation in the whole socio-technical 
context. It’s no surprise why methods like Agile have been created. This context 
emphasizes the importance of employee voice behaviour as a means for workers to keep 
up with the demanding and fast-paced work environment (Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). 
All in all, acknowledgment of individuals’ personality traits can help managers to gain a 
deeper understanding of their employees which enriches the one-on-one connection that 
is essential for creating a psychologically safe team environment and was a universal 
requirement for all personality traits. However, a manager should be extra careful and 
mindful when conducting personality trait assessments for employees. Some employees 
might feel like they expose themselves too much in that way and it should be made clear 
that doing a test like the mini-IPIP is voluntary, extremely confidential and secure. 
Perhaps enabling a scientifically valid personality test to be done for the employees for 
Psychological safety
Personal one-to-
one connection 
with manager
Employee Voice 
Behaviours
Self-Criticism
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness, 
Neuroticism & Intellect –
Imagination
Business 
Transformation 
Project 
47 
 
only their own use. It could help people gain more self-awareness and that awareness 
brings depth to one-on-one interactions with the manager.  
5.1 Limitations of the study 
Self-report bias is one of the key challenges in relying to self-report measures for 
conducting research. I have addressed the challenge by creating an anonymous space for 
people to answer honestly but the unconscious willingness to make yourself look better 
in the eyes of a researcher (and yourself) is hard to manage. I have also made visible the 
data governance process but regardless of these steps taken to avoid self-report bias there 
is a possibility it affects the results of the study. What people think of themselves and 
how they really are perceived by others are not always aligned. Donaldson and Grant-
Wallone (2003) summarize self-report bias as phenomenon: “In general, research 
participants want to respond in a way that makes them look as good as possible. Thus, 
they tend to under-report behaviors deemed inappropriate by researchers or other 
observers, and they tend to over-report behaviors viewed as appropriate. Self-report bias 
is particularly likely in organizational behaviour research because employees often 
believe there is at least a remote possibility that their employer could gain access to their 
responses.”. 
My sample size of interviewed people, although varying in their cultural background and 
geographical location, could have been greater. This fact might limit the generalizability 
of the results. However, as you know well at this point the aim of the study is to give 
direction for future research to investigate these relationships further and for that purpose 
the sample size was sufficient. In addition, the people interviewed were mostly from 
Western culture and female, this might lead to some bias in the connection between 
perception of psychological safety and personality traits. I would like to highlight that 
these findings might not be universal to human nature but rather tied to a generation born 
and raised in a certain time in a certain (Western) part of the world. 
One obvious limitation is that the interviewer himself has not conducted research 
independently before, so there are possibilities that the lack of experience might affect 
the results in ways the interviewer doesn’t recognize –but this is also a limitation of almost 
all qualitative and quantitative research when there is interpretation of data in play. 
48 
5.2 Future research 
This research for a Master’s Thesis opens a window to future research to be conducted 
on the field. Given the nature of what we know currently about the human brain and how 
that knowledge is rapidly evolving, I think there are gaps in the knowledge to be filled 
concerning personality traits, psychological safety and digital business transformation. 
Companies are under heavier digitization and need for digital innovation than ever and 
the advent of technological advances like generative AI. As long as a firm’s operation 
involves humans, the need to study the psychological phenomena’s effects on project 
success will be there. Regarding managerial tools and change management practices 
available, I wonder if AI could be incorporated into the future research settings of this 
topic. One could study how the use of Large-Language-Model based assistants or task 
manager bots who e.g. run a meeting or take notes, could help in fostering psychological 
safety in a team and take personalities into account. 
And lastly, descending on the level of ideation from a futuristic vision to the actual next 
step, it would make sense to conduct a similar set of research with a bigger quantity of 
participants and focus on the Agreeableness and Conscientiousness dimensions of the 
big-five personality traits.
49 
 
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57 
 
Appendices 
Appendix 1 – Interview questions 
Interview questions: 
 
1. What is your professional background, education? 
2. How long have you worked with large business transformation projects (how about as a 
driver of change?) 
3. Think of a time when you have been forced to change your behaviour. How do you 
typically respond to change in your work environment? (E.g. Anxiety, stalling of 
commitment, negative first impression, excitement?) Role difference, change affecting 
you (new tools etc.) or being a driver of the change for the client? 
4. Can you describe a time you have made a mistake in a large scale project environment? 
How did it make you feel? 
5. Have you often opted for continuing a meeting without clarifying anything, in order to 
avoid being perceived as someone who is unaware? 
6. Can you describe a time at work when you felt particularly safe and supported 
psychologically? And if so, why? 
7. What do you think team members can do to support each other's sense of psychological 
safety during an IT transformation project? – 1on1 online or f2f? 
8. Do you usually feel like you can ask what the goal of a task or a project is, without the 
risk of sounding like you’re the only one out of the loop? 
9. Are there any specific types of support or communication that you feel are particularly 
helpful during stressful times and rapid change at the workplace? 
10. Overall, how important is acknowledgement of personalities and psychological safety 
for the success of an IT transformation project? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
58 
Appendix 2 – Research Data Management Plan 
This document is a data management plan for the Master’s Thesis of Matias Mäkinen at the 
University of Turku. 
1. Research data  
Research data refers to all the material with which the analysis and results of the research can be 
verified and reproduced. It may be, for example, various measurement results, data from 
surveys or interviews, recordings or videos, notes, software, source codes, biological samples, 
text samples, or collection data. 
In the table below, list all the research data you use in your research. Note that the data may 
consist of several different types of data, so please remember to list all the different data types. 
List both digital and physical research data. 
Research 
data type 
Contains personal 
details/information
* 
I will 
gather/produc
e the data 
myself 
Someone else has 
gathered/produce
d the data 
Other notes 
Example, 
Data type 1:  
Interviews 
x x   
Example, 
Data type 2: 
Survey 
questionnair
e 
x x  Mini-IPIP 
standard 
questionnair
e questions 
     
     
* Personal details/information are all information based on which a person can be identified directly or 
indirectly, for example by connecting a specific piece of data to another, which makes identification 
possible. For more information about what data is considered personal go to the Office of the Finnish 
Data Protection Ombudsman’s website 
2. Processing personal data in research 
I will prepare a Data Protection Notice** and give it to the research participants before 
collecting data ☒ 
The controller** for the personal details is the student themself ☒ the university ☐ 
My data does not contain any personal data ☐ 
59 
 
** More information at the university’s intranet page, Data Protection Guideline for Thesis Research 
3. Permissions and rights related to the use of data 
3.1 Self-collected data 
You may need separate permissions to use the data you collect or produce, both in research and 
in publishing the results. If you are archiving your data, remember to ask the research 
participants for the necessary permissions for archiving and further use of the data. Also, find 
out if the repository/archive you have selected requires written permissions from the 
participants. 
Necessary permissions and how they are acquired 
Data type 1: Interview data, pseudonymized.  
Data type 2: Personality trait survey, pseudonymized. 
4. Storing the data during the research process 
 
Data will be stored in: Personal computer hard drive (offline) ☒ and iCloud Drive and Google 
Drive ☒ 
I will create backup files for the research data. Pseudonymized answers for the personality trait 
survey are stored in Google Drive. 
The interviews will be recorded with a smart device and data stored in the abovementioned 
Cloud Services.  
5. Documenting the data and metadata 
5.1 Data documentation 
Can you describe what has happened to your research data during the research process? Data 
documentation is essential when you try to track any changes made to the data.  
To document the data, I will use: 
A field/research journal ☐ 
A separate document where I will record the main points of the data, such as changes made, 
phases of analysis, and significance of variables ☒ 
A readme file linked to the data that describes the main points of the data ☐ 
Other, please specify: ☐ 
 
5.2 Data arrangement and integrity 
60 
I will keep the original data files separate from the data I am using in the research process, so 
that I can always revert back to the original, if need be. ☒ 
Version control: I will plan before starting the research how I will name the different data 
versions and I will adhere to the plan consistently. ☒ 
I recognise the life span of the data from the beginning of the research and am already 
prepared for situations, where the data can alter unnoticed, for example while recording, 
transcribing, downloading, or in data conversions from one file format to another, etc. ☒ 
5.3 Metadata  
I will not store my data into a public archive/repository, and therefore I will not need to create 
any metadata. ☒  
6. Data after completing the research 
You are responsible for the data even after the research process has ended. Make sure you will 
handle the data according to the agreements you have made. The university recommends a 
general retention period of five (5) years, with an exception for medical research data, where the 
retention period is 15 years. Personal data can only be stored as long as it is necessary. If you 
have agreed to destroy the data after a set time period, you are responsible for destroying the 
data, even if you no longer are a student at the university. Likewise, when using the university’s 
online storage services, destroying the data is your responsibility. 
What happens to your research data, when the research is completed? 
I will store all research data (except for personal identifiers) for a maximum of 5 years. 
I will destroy all personal data immediately after completion, because: it is no longer needed 
after successful completion of Thesis. 
If you will store the data, please identify where: iCloud Drive.