In this chapter we seek to identify work-related factors that shape personality change. We focus on changes occurring in individuals’ personalities as a result of their work and employment experiences and of the socialising pressure of normative demands arising during these experiences – that is, the ‘socialisation effect’. To offer a broad overview, we seek to identify drivers in the work, organisational and societal environment, including factors at the work level (for example, work and vocational characteristics, leadership and achievement), the organisational level (organisational structure and culture, among others) and the broader societal level (changing technology in the workplace, increasingly precarious employment, delayed retirement age and cultural changes are a few examples). To achieve the goal of this chapter, we take three steps, which also reflect the structure of this chapter.

First, we provide a brief review of traditions in organisational and social psychology regarding the study of work and personality change. While studies of personality development have emerged in personality psychology in last few decades (see Chapter 2), the role of the work environment in shaping personality change has also been well recognised in both organisational psychology (see Brousseau, 1983; Frese, 1982) and social psychology (see House, 1981; Jokela, 2017; McLeod & Lively, 2006; Ryff, 1987). We seek to incorporate these traditions into our discussion. Second, based on knowledge derived from personality, organisational and social psychology, we propose a holistic framework to help identify key drivers in the work, organisational and societal environment, and illustrate how they could act as proximal and distal drivers for personality change. Third, we use the proposed framework to review what is already known in the literature and elaborate on what more needs to be explored to advance the understanding of work and personality change.

Traditional understanding of work and personality change in organisational and social psychology

Organisational psychologists, particularly scholars studying work design, have argued that job experiences and work characteristics can change people's temperament or personality (Frese, 1982; Hall & Las Heras, 2010; Parker & Turner, 2002). The German action theory, for example, considers humans as active beings who develop and change through action (Frese & Zapf, 1994).