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Personality and perception during the COVID-19 crisis

Purpose and scope of the COVID-19 personality and perceptions survey

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on people’s lives, both at home and at work. Many have lost their jobs, and those who remain may experience additional pressure, stress, or feelings of ‘survivor guilt’. More widely, many people are worried about the economy, or the health of their family and friends, or a myriad of other concerns.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment is already widely used to build self-awareness and help people understand their reaction to stress. As such, it can provide the basis for guidelines to help individuals and organizations adapt to the effects of the pandemic. This report describes the results of a survey into the relationship of personality type and other factors to feelings, concerns and attitudes to the pandemic, and to working during the pandemic. Data was collected between May and September 2020. The results have been used to create practical recommendations and guidelines.

These, and the survey results, are summarized below.

Results

The major findings include:

• Compared with their work status in February 2020, several respondents had lost their jobs. This reflects changes in the wider population.
• When respondents were asked to come up with words that described their feelings about the situation, negative words predominated, especially words around being anxious, worried, concerned, fearful or scared. Words around uncertainty, confusion, chaos and the unknown, around being frustrated, angry, annoyed, or irritated, around being stressed, overwhelmed, tired or exhausted, and around being sad, depressed, emotional or heartbroken were also fairly common. However, several people did use words like opportunity, hope or optimism.
• Survey respondents were asked how much a set of factors relating to the pandemic concerned them. By some degree, the possibility of the economy going into recession was of the greatest concern. At the other end of the scale, respondents’ relationship with their spouse or partner was of the least concern.
• In contrast, when asked specific questions about their working lives, many respondents tended to give rather more positive answers. This was especially the case for remote workers but applied to non-remote workers too. This suggests that for many of those in work, their wider expectations and worries about the COVID pandemic may be more negative than their day to day lived experience. People were worried to some extent about the bigger picture and about how COVID was affecting others, and were somewhat more stressed than usual, but were generally positive about their jobs.
  
  At least for people who are in work, their day to day working experience seems not to be as negative as one might expect from their wider concerns and worries. However, those who do see their working lives in a more negative way also had greater worries and concerns about the wider picture.
• Remote workers tended to see their situation more positively than non-remote workers. The latter group expressed more worries about their friends and family and their co-workers. Given that they were not able to isolate in the same way as many remote workers, this is not surprising. However, with this exception, they still in general tended to endorse positive statements. 
• The five statements most endorsed by remote workers were:
  
  
  • Virtual communication apps like Skype, Teams or Zoom are very useful to me
  • I have all the equipment and technology I need to work from home
  • I enjoy having the flexibility to work when I want
  • I feel that my organization values my contribution
  • I enjoy working from home
• The five statements most endorsed by non-remote workers were:
  
  
  • I am finding lots of things to do
  • Virtual communication apps like Skype, Teams or Zoom are very useful to me
  • I am worried about my friends and family
  • I feel that my organization values my contribution
  • I am worried about my co-workers
• Personality type had a significant impact on people’s responses to the survey. Respondents with a Feeling preference tended to have more negative views than those with a Thinking preference. To a lesser extent, the same applied to those with preferences for Sensing rather than Intuition and, amongst remote workers, Extraversion rather than Introversion.
• Detailed results on personality type, and guidelines for each type, are given in the final chapter of this report. However, some of the major findings include:
  
  
  • Though people of all personality preferences generally appreciated working from home, those with a preference for Extraversion were more likely to be missing contact with other people. Many missed having people around, saw life as being too quiet, worried that they were becoming too isolated, and were watching more TV or streaming services than before.
  • Those with a Sensing preference were significantly more concerned than those with an Intuitive preference about managing motivation, having the children at home for an extended period, and managing stress. Remote workers with an Intuitive preference were significantly more likely than those with a Sensing preference to say that they were enjoying the peace and quiet of working from home, and that they were more motivated than before, whereas many of those with a Sensing preference were finding it difficult to remain focused.
  • Respondents with a Feeling preference were more likely to use negative, emotive words to describe their feelings about the pandemic and they expressed significantly more concern about managing motivation, managing stress, being productive while working remotely, managing conflict, and about their relationship with their spouse or partner. They were also significantly less positive about working from home than those with a Thinking preference, seeing themselves as more stressed, less appreciative of working from home, less motivated and engaged, and less positive about using virtual apps. They were more likely to feel guilty that they still had a job and to wish that they did not have to work from home, found it more difficult to concentrate and remain focused, and were more likely to worry that they were becoming too isolated.
  • Remote workers with a Judging preference were were more likely than those with a Perceiving preference to say that they had settled into a routine, and while they did on average agree that they enjoyed having the flexibility to work when they wanted, they agreed less strongly with this than those with a Perceiving preference. Those with a Perceiving preference very much enjoyed having the flexibility to work when they wanted and, while many had settled into a routine, some were finding things too predictable and routine. Amongst non-remote workers, those with a Perceiving preference were more likely to say that they would have preferred to be able to work remotely.
  • Women, remote workers, and those with a Feeling preference were significantly more likely than others to feel guilty that they still had a job when others had lost theirs. They had a higher level of ‘survivor guilt’. Amongst newly remote workers, levels of survivor guilt have been increasing over time.
  • Younger workers tended to see the situation in a more negative light. Amongst non-remote workers, younger people were more likely to say that they wished they could have been able to work remotely.
  • Amongst remote workers, those working full-time saw their jobs as more stressful than the self-employed or those working part-time, and they were more worried about their friends and family.
  • More senior staff expressed higher levels of work-related stress and greater concerns about the effects of COVID-19.
  • In general, respondents who had already been working remotely before the pandemic gave the least negative responses and non-remote workers the most negative, with newly remote workers in between.
  • There is some evidence that those who completed the survey more recently were more frustrated or angry than earlier respondents, and therefore that the degree of anger may be increasing over time.

Implications and recommendations

The results of this survey present something of a contradiction. When asked to describe their feelings about the COVID pandemic, most people tended to use negative words, and to show a fairly high degree of concern about some aspects of the crisis, most notably about the economy going into recession.

Yet when asked specific questions about their working lives, many tended to give rather more positive answers. This suggests that for many of those in work, their expectations and worries about the COVID pandemic may be more negative than their day to day lived experience. People were worried about the bigger picture and about how COVID was affecting others, and were somewhat more stressed than usual, but were generally more positive about their jobs. However, those who did see their working lives in a more negative way will also had greater concerns about the wider picture and used more negative words.

Those seeing the COVID pandemic and their working lives in a more negative and less adaptive way were more likely to be female, younger, have personality preferences for Feeling rather than Thinking, have been laid off or furloughed, be working non-remotely rather than remotely, be working full-time, and be in a more senior role, especially at executive or senior managerial levels. These results can help HR professionals, managers, and individual workers identify who may be more at psychological risk while working during the COVID pandemic. With reference to personality differences, they have been used as the basis for creating guidelines to help people to adapt better to the situation. Detailed personality type-based guidelines are shown earlier in this report.

Guilt about still having a job was most keenly felt by women with a Feeling personality preference who had recently transitioned to become remote workers. Many managers have a Thinking preference and may therefore be less prone themselves to survivor guilt, so it is important for them to appreciate that this could be a factor in an employee’s well-being and performance.

Treating those who were laid off in a humane way, and letting remaining staff know this, reassuring survivors that even if they had been prepared to give up their own jobs this would not have made a difference, and avoiding over-emphatic congratulations on still having a job can help. When individuals feel that their psychological contract with an organization has been broken they may start looking for another job, and those with a Feeling preference might walk away from their jobs and the organization without explanation or warning if they think their values have been compromised.

The data suggests that those who are not able to work remotely, or who have chosen not to do so, may be having a more negative working experience than remote workers. Realistically, many organizations will be looking to have employees working from home for some time to come. Even after the pandemic has subsided and lockdowns and social distancing are no longer being enforced, remote working is likely to be attractive to organizations for financial reasons, and to many employees seeking to reduce commuting and increase time spent with family and friends.

The results of this research can help guide organizations as the features of working from home employees enjoy, those that they do not, and how people with different personality preferences may react to these in different ways.

Download the full research report here.