Teachers With Personality: General Traits versus Social-Emotional Characteristics and Instructional Competencies in Brazilian Teachers

Occupational groups differ systematically in their personality profiles, but broad personality traits may not fully capture the contextualized characteristics that differentiate individuals within specialized professions such as teaching. We examined how broad personality traits relate to a taxonomy of teaching-related Social-Emotional characteristics and Instructional competencies (SEI), organized into five domains: Bonding, Regulating, Expressing, Managing, and Innovating (BoREMI). Using data from 8,960 Brazilian teachers, we investigated whether teachers replicate the characteristic Big Five profile reported in prior research, how SEI organize within the broader personality framework, and the extent to which broad traits and their facets account for variance in these teaching-related characteristics. Teachers scored high on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low on Negative Emotionality, replicating the occupational personality profile observed in previous work. Joint factor analyses supported a six-factor solution comprising the Big Five plus an additional teaching-specific factor capturing shared variance across SEI. Personality facets explained 27% of the variance in SEI, indicating that these characteristics reflect substantial variance beyond broad dispositional traits. These findings suggest that teaching-related characteristics are systematically related to personality, yet not reducible to broad trait dimensions, and that occupationally contextualized assessments capture construct-relevant variance that generic personality taxonomies leave unaccounted for.