Surgeon personality diversity across generations and subspecialties

Traditional exploration of surgical professionals' personality traits focuses on general characteristics at the domain-level of the five-factor model. Personality has been related to clinically-relevant areas such as clinical decision-making and team effectiveness, yet there is limited insight in the personality of surgeons at the facet-level of the Big Five. Here, we performed a large-scale study examining domain- and facet-variations of personality in four surgical generations and subspecialties.

The Big Five Inventory-2, measuring the five domains and fifteen corresponding facets of personality, was distributed among all general surgery departments in the Netherlands. Surgically-interested medical students were approached via the surgical student society. A normative sample was matched for age to the surgical population. Corrected one-way analyses of variance were performed.

The surgical population (medical students (n = 126), surgical residents not-in-training (n = 147), surgical residents-in-training (n = 227), and surgeons (n = 539)) scored higher on open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and lower on negative emotionality relative to the normative population. Higher conscientiousness (p < 0.01) and lower negative emotionality (p < 0.001) were observed to increase per generation, together with lower open-mindedness scores in surgical residents (p < 0.001). Differences at the facet-level were present in five domains, including sub-traits such as productiveness, trust, and anxiety. Across environments, personality variances were observed in surgical subspecialty (conscientiousness, negative emotionality), teaching region (open-mindedness), and academics (open-mindedness).

We delineated nuanced personality variations across generations and subspecialties in the surgical population, marking a starting point in the introduction of personality insights in the professional domain of healthcare.