Issue Information ‐ TOC

• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21225

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

Moving on and Moving Upward: Final Refl ections and Farewell 9

Andrea D. Ellinger

QUANTITATIVE STUDY

Personality Traits and Career Satisfaction in Training and

Development Occupations: Toward a Distinctive T&D

Personality Profi le 13

Eric D. Sundstrom, John W. Lounsbury, Lucy W. Gibson, Jason L. Huang

As careers in training and development (T&D) continue to evolve,

almost no human resource development (HRD) research has investi-

gated personality traits in today’s T&D occupations, despite evidence

linking personality with work success. Toward fi lling this lacuna, we

identifi ed four Big Five personality traits and four narrow traits with

content matching T&D competencies. Based on person–career fi t the-

ory, we hypothesized that the trait profi le would differentiate T&D from

other occupations, and the traits would correlate with T&D career sat-

isfaction. From 90,000+ individuals receiving private career transition

services, we compared trait scores of 284 individuals in T&D occupa-

tions and the others via bootstrapping (5,000 random samples, n = 284,

with the same age and gender distributions). The T&D personality pro-

fi le was signifi cantly elevated, with greatest differences on the narrow

trait empathy, closely followed by assertiveness and customer service

orientation plus optimism (small difference), and signifi cant differences

on Big Five traits extraversion, openness, and agreeableness (small

difference), but no difference on emotional stability. T&D career

satisfaction correlated signifi cantly with fi ve traits in the profi le, most

strongly with emotional stability and optimism. Also, emotional stabil-

ity correlated more highly with career satisfaction for T&D than non-

T&D occupations. The distinctive T&D personality profile raises

questions for further HRD research and carries practical value for train-

ing and development of T&D personnel.

QUALITATIVE STUDY

To Reveal or Conceal? Managers’ Disclosures of Private

Information During Emotional Intelligence Training 41

Kathryn Thory

To date, emotional intelligence (EI) training interventions have been

underresearched. This study responds to this paucity of scholarship by

investigating the occurrence of private disclosures during managerial EI

training. While an unorthodox practice, this article argues that trainers

introduce opportunities to reveal private information to develop partici-

pants’ EI. The aims of this study are to explore the role of such disclo-

sures and how emotion influences managers’ decisions to reveal or

conceal private information. Data are drawn from participant observa-