Trend of Personality Development among the Cadets of Imam Ali University: Focus on the Negative Sub-traits

Abstract
As one of the most fundamental traits of human’s nature, the phenomena of personality has always been addressed by various schools of thoughts and even religions on human knowledge. In the meantime, the relationship between man and his environment or, in other words, his life and work context seems amenable to research in line with personality changes or developments. In line with this trend, military organizations, given their specific requirements, are assumed to be both effective in an individual’s personality development and they also aim at purposeful as well as an organization-oriented personality development that its realization requires massive investments and extensive expenditures. However, assurance of the achievement of such purpose, and the productivity of such efforts and investments with regard to personality developments have not been much the subject of integrated investigations. So, this study attempted to survey the trend of personality development among the cadets of Imam Ali University of the Islamic Republic of |Iran’s Army in the course of their education. To do so, totally 194 cadets including, respectively, 65, 65, and 64 who were selected randomly from amongst those who were admitted for 2017, 2018, and 2019 academic years, attempted NEO-RI-P personality questionnaire with 30 items. However, this paper is devoted to the report of the 20 sub-traits carrying negative connotation that every organization tries to develop them positively or at least to slow their negative growth and then to make its members pure from them. In a bid to analyses the collected data, both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses like MANOVA as to the questionnaire items and separate individual post hoc analyses were run. The findings revealed a decreasing trend among the sub-traits like anger, depression, instability, and susceptibility, but a fluctuating trend of emotionality, and ultimately an increasing status of imaginativeness and adventurousness. These findings may originate reconsiderations in educational curriculum, though the limitations like the composition of the participants and the data collection instrument should not be ignored.