Dynamic personality at work

The study of dynamic within-person personality responses using repeated measurement designs is emerging as a new focus in the study of personality at work, and offers great potential to build on and extend the large body of work on traits conducted by organizational researchers. In this chapter we provide a definition and discussion of dynamic personality and how it is both related to and differentiated from the trait approach in measurement and modelling. Both within-person and between-person variability in personality are considered worthy of study to gain insights into nomothetic principles. The cognitive-affective personality systems (CAPS) model provides a framework for modelling the underlying structure of dynamic personality responses as functions of situations, and provides an integration of the stable (between-person, nomothetic) and dynamic (within-person, idiographic and nomothetic) approaches to personality. This goes beyond the more fixed between-person approaches at contextualizing personality that capture context-related dynamics at the group level, such as trait activation theory and frame-of-reference studies. There are many big questions worthy of programs of research in this emerging field, which are the focus of the section “Challenges and future directions: where to from here?”