Personality and Individual Differences at Work: Career Adaptability and Development Across Career Stages

Personality and individual differences are among the strongest predictors of how people enter, perform in, and develop across their working lives. Decades of research have established the explanatory power of the Big Five, HEXACO, Dark Triad, and related frameworks for outcomes such as job performance, leadership, learning, and well-being. Yet contemporary careers look very different from the contexts in which these models were validated: transitions are more frequent, working lives are longer, and individuals face different developmental demands at entry, promotion, career disruption, and later career stages. How enduring individual differences shape adaptation, performance, and development as careers and work environments change remains an open question.This Research Topic advances a more dynamic, developmental understanding of personality and individual differences at work. Rather than asking only whether personality predicts work outcomes, we ask how individual differences shape career adaptation and development, how their effects vary across career stages and transitions, and how person-context interactions unfold over time. We aim to bridge personality science with organizational, vocational, and career development research, producing evidence that informs assessment, development, and human resource practice across the working lifespan, in support of decent work and lifelong learning.We welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological, and meta-analytic contributions using quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, longitudinal, or experience-sampling designs. Studies may examine individual differences broadly, including the Big Five, HEXACO, Dark Triad, cognitive abilities, motives, values, vocational interests, and other stable characteristics.We invite Original Research, Review, and Perspective articles addressing:• Personality traits (Big Five, HEXACO, Dark Triad, and related frameworks) as predictors of task and extra-role performance, creativity, leadership emergence and effectiveness, ethical behavior, and counterproductive work behavior;• Personality and career adaptability, including responses to changing work demands, uncertainty, career shocks, and transitions across organizational entry, mid-career change, occupational reinvention, and late-career engagement;• Changing effects of personality across the career course, including when and why adaptive and maladaptive traits become more or less consequential as roles, responsibilities, and situational strength or trait activation change, and when normally advantageous or socially aversive traits become liabilities or advantages;• Personality, learning, and skill development, including training engagement, reskilling, and adaptation to new tasks or technologies;• Personality and occupational mobility, including job crafting, career switching, entrepreneurship, and nonlinear career trajectories;• Personality and individual differences in adapting to changing work environments, including remote work, automation, and platform or gig work;• Personality development through work, including whether promotion, leadership responsibilities, or major career events contribute to change in personality, motives, or values over time;• Cross-cultural perspectives on how the relevance and expression of individual differences vary across labor markets and career systems.We particularly welcome longitudinal, multi-level, and intervention-based research, and contributions that identify developmental mechanisms, meaningful moderators, and person-context contingencies shaping careers over time. Topic editors: Panagiotis Tsaknis, Alexandros Sahinidis Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82655/personality-and-individual-differences-at-work-career-adaptability-and-development-across-career-stages