It’s easy to assume that building a strong company culture means hiring people with the same personality traits. After all, shared interests and working styles can create harmony, right? But real culture isn’t about uniformity—it’s about shared values, a common vision, and a balance of diverse perspectives that drive the business forward.
Culture Isn’t a Personality Type
Too often, businesses fall into the trap of hiring based on a “fit” of people with identical personality triats. Whilst fit is important, hiring people who think, act, and work in the same way is rarely optimal. While this might make for a comfortable working environment, it also leads to an echo chamber where new ideas struggle to surface and innovation stalls.
Research from Harvard Business School highlights that companies overly focused on hiring the same type of personality often end up with a homogenous workforce, limiting creativity and problem-solving ability.
The reality is that culture isn’t about finding people who mirror each other’s personalities; it’s about aligning people behind a purpose and empowering them to contribute in their own way. Studies on organisational behaviour suggest that companies with cognitively diverse teams perform better under pressure and adapt more quickly to change.
Diversity Drives Growth
A thriving company culture is built on diversity—not just in demographics but in thinking, experience, and working styles. Some of the best teams are those that combine visionaries with pragmatists, risk-takers with cautious analysts, and creative thinkers with process-driven executors.
Companies with greater diversity in leadership outperform their less diverse competitors financially. Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams are 36% more likely to have above-average profitability compared to those in the bottom quartile.
Values Over Vibes
Instead of hiring for specific personality matches, hire for values. What matters is not whether someone shares the same sense of humour or social preferences but whether they share the company’s core beliefs and principles and importantly, whether these traits interact well with each other.
Research suggests that value alignment, rather than personality similarity, is a stronger predictor of long-term job satisfaction and employee retention.
When employees connect with the company’s purpose and values, they are more engaged, productive, and committed. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability. This isn’t about forcing conformity—it’s about creating an environment where people can bring their best selves to work while working toward a shared mission.
Culture is Behaviour, Not Just Beliefs
Culture is ultimately shaped by how people behave day to day and how they interact with each other. It’s in how teams collaborate, how leaders make decisions, how the company responds to challenges, and how employees support one another.
Psychological safety—a term coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson—plays a crucial role in building a healthy workplace culture. Her research shows that teams with high psychological safety are more willing to take risks, share ideas, and challenge the status quo without fear of punishment. Companies that prioritise this create environments where people feel valued, leading to stronger performance and innovation.
Moreover, organisations that build inclusive cultures benefit from lower turnover rates. Companies with inclusive cultures are twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets and six times more likely to be innovative and agile.
The Importance of Trait Interaction
The interaction of personality traits in practical terms is more important to culture than the individual traits themselves. Sophisticated personality profiling, such as CJPI’s OPP reports, can go beyond looking at the face value of specific personality traits and look more deeply into team roles, leadership and subordinate styles to ensure that the interaction of these traits is likely to be productive. For example, financial leaders are often very different people to creatives – but how they interact with each other to get the most out of each functional area is critical to an organisation’s culture.
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