The effects of personality on supervisory control tasks

Personality is a collection of holistic human traits: character, perception of the world, covert and overt behaviors, uniqueness in functioning and coping within cultural setting, and response to different environmental stimuli. While many studies have focused on perception and cognitive aspects of supervisory control (SC), not much consideration is given to the effect of personality on supervisory control performance. In this paper, results showing the effects of Type A and Type B personality types on SC and workload perception are discussed. One major finding of the study shows that Type A individuals respond better than Type B to monitoring single tasks for automation failure, and they also experience the least amount of workload in both single and multiple SC tasks. However, Type A individuals made significantly more errors, than Type B individuals, during system monitoring and resource management tasks.