Temperament at Work: Which Conditions Suit Your Type

When a company tears down the partitions and moves people into an open-plan office, they start talking to each other less. Bernstein and Turban (2018) measured face-to-face contact between colleagues before and after the move and found it dropped by roughly seventy percent, while traffic on email and chat rose. The open space did not increase collaboration, it just sent it to a screen.

For company management that is an interesting number. For a person trying to concentrate in a room like that, it is a description of every Monday. The same office is a different workplace for two people, and one of the reasons is called temperament.

What temperament makes visible at work

The four types were described by Hippocrates and named by Galen, but it was Hans Eysenck in the 1950s and 1960s who brought them back into modern psychology. He built them on two axes: extraversion against introversion and emotional stability against instability. The sanguine comes out as a stable extravert, the choleric as an unstable extravert, the phlegmatic as a stable introvert and the melancholic as an unstable introvert. A more detailed history is in the overview of the four temperaments.

Most of the differences you see around you at work every day follow from those two axes. How fast a person gets going on a task, how much noise they can take around them and whether pressure gets them going or shuts them down.

What does not follow from it is performance. Temperament says nothing about who does their job better, how clever somebody is or whether they can be relied on. It only says how much energy a given way of working costs you. And because energy is a limited raw material at work, that is not nothing.

In practice the differences show up in three recurring situations. The first is an approaching deadline, because it gets one person going and freezes another. The second is the meeting, where you can see who thinks out loud and who needs silence first. The third is the space around the desk itself, meaning whether the buzz charges you or drains your concentration over the course of a morning.

The four temperaments between nine and five

Sanguine: fast to start, worse at finishing

Getting a new thing off the ground is your domain. You have the idea for a project during the meeting, you have two people on board by lunch and by the afternoon you are already calling somebody. A deadline three weeks away leaves you calm; the one tomorrow fires you up.

In a meeting you come alive and enjoy talking, but a detour into an anecdote suits you better than a set of minutes with tasks. You are fine in an open-plan office as long as you sit near people you get along with. What you handle worst is silence, spreadsheets and work where nobody tells you for three days whether it is going well.

Choleric: cannot stand waiting

You decide before the others have finished describing the task, and you take responsibility gladly, because a free hand comes with it. You move your deadline earlier so you can have peace. When a round of sign-off drags on, the pace of the people around you gets on your nerves more than the work itself.

A meeting without a conclusion is an hour lost for you. The open-plan office bothers you not because of the noise but because every other person pulls you out of something half-finished. What harms you most, though, is your own speed: a sentence said in the heat of the moment lives on in the team a month after you have forgotten it.

Phlegmatic: the same pace on Tuesday and on Friday

You keep a steady output even when everybody around you is sprinting. It takes you longer to get going, but you stay with a task the others tired of long ago. You meet deadlines and nobody expects drama from you, so management usually notices you only when you are not there.

In meetings you stay quiet and nod, except that the people around you read that nod as agreement. Then you wonder where the plan came from that you never signed up to. The open-plan office does not bother you all that much; what wears you out is the fifth reshuffling of priorities in a month.

Melancholic: quality comes before speed

You hand in work finished to the last detail, because you cannot hand it in any other way. Your bar is so high that your own result rarely seems good to you, even when others praise it. The deadline is therefore usually tight, and not out of laziness but because of the final check.

In a fast discussion you stay quiet even when you have the best observation in the room, and you send it by email an hour after the meeting. The open-plan office is the most expensive environment of all four for you, because every interruption costs you far more than the minute it took. A general complaint along the lines of "it could be better" then keeps running in you for a whole week.

Hardly anybody recognizes themselves completely in one of those four descriptions. Most people have one pronounced temperament and a second one as a streak, so in one situation a sanguine need for people jumps out and in another a melancholic need to have the thing done properly. How the individual pairs play out is covered in the piece on temperament combinations.

The environment where work costs you less

The table below is not a guide to choosing a profession. It describes conditions, not fields, because one and the same profession can be practiced in five different settings, and the difference between them tends to be bigger than the difference between fields.

The open-plan office deserves one clarification, because it has become the universal culprit. The melancholic takes it worst, since every interruption costs them a piece of concentrated work. The choleric objects for a different reason: they cannot stand being pulled out of something half-finished, even though the noise itself does not bother them. The phlegmatic usually puts up with it as long as the rules around them do not change, and the sanguine positively thrives in it. So one and the same office costs four people four different amounts of energy, and the difference has nothing to do with who works harder.

In a team those differences collide, and a difference in pace easily turns into a personal dispute. What a manager can do about it is described in the separate piece on the four temperaments in a team.

Temperament does not determine your profession

This is where precision matters, because career determinism spreads fast. Being a melancholic does not mean you belong in a laboratory, and a choleric is under no obligation to start a business. Temperament has nothing to do with what you are capable of, only with what it will cost you.

Research on the match between person and environment, known as person-environment fit, agrees. The meta-analysis by Kristof-Brown and colleagues (2005) pulled together hundreds of studies and found a consistent relationship between a person's fit with the job, the team and the organization on one side and job satisfaction and lower intention to quit on the other. The link with performance comes out much weaker. In other words: an environment that does not suit you is more likely to drive you out than to make you a worse worker.

It shows best in people who sit in the "wrong" profession and do well. Paul sells laboratory instruments and he is a textbook melancholic: he speaks slowly, arrives at a sales meeting ten minutes early and double-checks every number. In an ordinary call center he would last a month. But his customers are engineers who do not want energetic enthusiasm; they want somebody who knows the specifications by heart and does not oversell. He sells more than colleagues who talk ten times faster.

What made the difference was not the field but the way he practices it. If you want to build a picture of yourself, take the temperament test (24 questions, about 4 minutes) and read the result as a description of conditions, not as a recommendation of a field. The test is a tool for self-knowledge; it is not suitable as a filter for job applicants and should not be used that way.

The frustration that comes back every week

A one-off annoyance does not say much about you. The interesting one is the one that returns: the same situation, the same feeling, every week. It usually points to a mismatch between how you most like to work and how your job actually runs.

Can you remember a day at work after which you had more energy in the evening than in the morning? If it is hard to bring one to mind, it is worth digging further, because days like that are exactly what reveals which conditions suit you.

What can be done about recurring frustration without handing in your notice right away:

• Sanguine: split a big task into parts where something is visible within two days, and write down hallway agreements immediately.
• Choleric: complaining about slow approvals leads nowhere, an agreed mandate does. Up to what amount and what size of change do you decide on your own?
• Phlegmatic: silence counts as agreement in a team, so even "I need to think about it until tomorrow" is better than a nod.
• Melancholic: an agreement about what exactly counts as done saves more grief than any time-management technique.

There is a boundary, though, beyond which these adjustments will not help. When work has been draining you for a year and the only thing that changes is the degree of tiredness, this is not about temperament but about health. How the four types behave under sustained pressure is covered in the piece on temperament and stress.

A week that will tell you more about your job than a test

Try one thing for seven days. Every evening write one sentence about what drained you most that day and one about what left you feeling better than you did in the morning. No judging, no explaining, just two sentences.

After a week compare the two columns. Do not look in them for a field or a job title, look for what repeats. Buzz or quiet? The power to decide, or peace to finish? The answer to that question can be used in the job you have right now, and that is more than any list of recommended occupations will ever give you.