Preliminary Results of Personalities in Funeral Industry Workers A recent dual-survey study shines an unusually bright light on the people who guide families through loss. Sixteen funeral-service professionals, drawn from the Montana Funeral Directors Association Convention, completed two validated assessments: the 60-item HEXACO Personality Inventory and the 96-item VIA Character Strengths questionnaire. Taken together, these tools sketch a living portrait of temperament and values. The first notable finding lies in the HEXACO scores themselves, which measure six facets of personality: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness. Conscientiousness registered a group mean of 4.21 on a five-point scale, driven chiefly by very high diligence (average 4.58). That numerical peak fits the daily realities of funeral work, where every certificate must be filed and every timing detail is checked twice. Honesty-Humility followed closely at 3.81, anchored by sincerity (4.06) and fairness (3.95). When practitioners say, “There are no hidden fees,” the psychometrics suggest they probably mean it. Emotionality, by contrast, sat lower at 3.06. In practical terms, the staff keep their composure: They empathize without becoming overwhelmed. Extraversion and Openness both hover near 3.5. This results in a profile that is sociable and intellectually curious without tipping into showmanship or novelty seeking for its own sake. Layered on top of those big picture traits are the rankings from the VIA Character Strengths questionnaire, which assesses 24 different character strengths. Here, the previously described pattern becomes even clearer. Nine of 16 respondents, an outright majority, showed Honesty as their single strongest quality. Curiosity and Humor tied for a distant second, each endorsed twice and solidified the value of the previously mentioned HEXACO model findings. Once every strength is mapped back to its virtue, it was found that the Courage domain dominates: honesty, bravery, perseverance and zest collectively account for more than half of the group’s top picks. Humanity, the virtue family that hosts kindness, love and social intelligence, takes a respectable second place with three endorsements. Wisdom and Transcendence claim two each, while Justice and Temperance receive none. The absence of Justice-type leaders does not mean staff are unjust; it simply means no one sees teamwork or fairness as the one trait that defines them. Likewise, Temperance’s blank column flags a relative scarcity of people who self-identify primarily with prudence or self-regulation. Those self-regulation signals become louder when we flip the lens to bottom-ranked strengths, with Self-Regulation and Love being named as the lowest common shared character strengths, each cited three times. Low Self-Regulation dovetails neatly with HEXACO Prudence scores, which, while respectable, trail By TEAGUE McCHESNEY and MADISON MARTINEZ, Psychological Research Team, MSU‑Northern 18 | Directors Digest
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