One of the challenges to write about “conscience” is that I am pro-science. Fortunately, conscience does not have much to do with con but a con artist can give the appearance of being conscientious. Let us first see what being conscientious is about. It refers to a person’s degree of organization, responsibility, and dependability. Organization does not just mean everything is orderly in a person’s office. A grad school professor of mine had one of the messiest offices with papers and books all over his room. However, when I asked him a question, from his pile of papers that was taller than him, within seconds he was able to retrieve a document for me. What looked like a needle in a haystack for me was not the case for him. He was fully aware of where what is in his messy office. He just did not have the time or interest to clean it up (I was a student at that time, and did not ask why it was so).
The other two parts of being conscientious is being responsible and dependable. While the two terms are related, responsibility is stepping up to take on tasks as well as accepting the outcome without blaming others. However, being responsible is also being dependable which is delivering what one promises in a timely fashion. Having said that, finding responsible people in an organization is not difficult but the same cannot be said of dependable ones. In fact, the responsible ones own up and take responsibility when they cannot keep their word. While that is clearly better than blaming others or circumstances, such folks cannot be treated like an abacus (i.e. you cannot count on them). Having said that, if one is highly dependable but does not take on too many responsibilities by playing it safe, it is not clear that is desirable either. So the need is both responsibility and dependability (along with staying organized).
Recall from the previous post that the Big Five personality traits using the OCEAN mnemonic are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This article is about the second of those traits. From a workplace standpoint, this may be one of the more crucial traits to look for in an employee. It is also important to point out that it comes with downsides that we will get to later. Continuing with the positives, there are other words that gets associated with conscience, one of them is integrity. These are folks with a strong moral compass but the conscience aspect is about sticking to norms and rules with high integrity. Conscientious employees are typically hard working and show perseverance. Another aspect of conscience is being stoic, i.e. with a lot of self-control. That along with a strong sense of duty would sum up the various aspects of conscientiousness.
The reason it is not a personality type but a personality trait is because this is not 0 or 1 but one can be somewhere in the continuum. Also, it depends on circumstances. For example, people are more conscientious towards things that are aligned towards their values and purpose. When things are aligned to our values and purpose, we are motivated to put in the effort, pay attention to detail, and work hard. But if they go against our values or purpose, we may not display conscientiousness. For example, if automating a task would get 5 people out of a job and that goes against our values, then we would not feel up to it although we would have been extremely conscientious if it would give 5 more people a job. So as supervisors it is important to know where our subordinates are and assign them projects they can shine at. Hence, it is important to not dismiss a person as not being conscientious, they just may not be into it.
There is an element of time as well when it comes to being conscientious. For example, teaching well in class may completely align with our values and purposes. However, we may not have the time to do everything it takes to be fully conscientious in the classroom. It is balancing act as we have so many other responsibilities. Some thing else has to go then. So instead of being a 0.9 in conscientiousness in the classroom, we may settle for a 0.8 carving a huge chunk of time to spend on our other tasks. The same holds for other professions too, when we are juggling too many things as an individual, it may not be a bad idea to take a hit on conscience. That brings us to the cons of conscience.
Although generally conscientiousness in the workplace is an excellent thing, we could consider some of its downsides so we can strategically dial down on it.
Burnout
Say you create software, and being conscientious you take responsibility to create a program and deliver it by a certain date. Wanting to be dependable, you make sure the product is delivered in a timely fashion and the code is super-organized. Whatever ChatGPT-4 can do to help, if this becomes an insurmountable task, then that would result in burnout. Some people ask for more time, some cut down on the number of items they sign up for, while others slowly burn out. Unless workload can be manageable, conscientiousness may not be sustainable.
Perfectionism
We alluded to giving 0.8 instead of a 0.9 in our work earlier in the article. A perfectionist cannot settle for anything but a 1.0 in any task. As stated in here, “people at the higher end of the conscientious scale may be at risk of perfectionism and workaholism”. It is possible that leads to stress and anxiety. Highly conscientious people can be hard on themselves and do everything it takes to get a perfect outcome. This could be problematic in the long haul.
Inflexible and Non-spontaneous
Although we do not want to go as far as being impulsive or risk-taking, those are traits that are not typical for someone who is conscientious. However, those are important for the workplace. Doing thing impromptu and not over-thinking (also called analysis paralysis) can be useful in many situations. Sometimes extremely conscientious people come off as inflexible and lack spontaneity. Also, their perseverance does not allow them to drop things that are not working!
Will we go from a hustle culture to a laid back one?