Professional curiosity at work is the drive to search, explore and put yourself into situations that carry the potential to teach you something. Over a career it does three things: it builds knowledge, it develops intellectual and creative capacity, and it strengthens the relationships you depend on to get anything done.
Define it that way and a bottomless psychological field opens up. Curiosity overlaps with openness to experience, novelty seeking, empathy, need for cognition, motivation, tolerance of ambiguity, integrative complexity, tolerance of uncertainty, tolerance of frustration and sensation seeking. I will stop there, because the list runs considerably longer.
What interests me is the practical end. Curiosity is not one thing, it has a measurable structure, and the structure explains why two people described as curious behave in completely different ways at work. This article sets out that structure, the profiles it produces, and the trap waiting for any organisation that turns a profile into a label.
| The cliche | The measured reality | The mirror |
|---|---|---|
| Professional curiosity at work, definedProfessional curiosity at work is usually treated as a single quality running from incurious to very curious. On that scale a person is either an asset or a liability, and the assessment takes about four seconds. | Five dimensions, not one scaleValidated research finds five distinct dimensions: joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, social curiosity and thrill seeking. They correlate differently with wellbeing, with innovation and with tenacity, and a high score on one says almost nothing about the others. | A profile describes conditions, not characterThe low-scoring profiles are the most misread. A person who applies curiosity only where their job requires it is displaying good judgement about a workplace that has never rewarded anything more. |
Why assessing professional curiosity is more complex than it looks
Assessing curiosity at work means separating three things that look identical from the outside: whether someone is drawn to new information for its own sake, whether they are closing a gap that bothers them, and whether they judge themselves able to cope with the discomfort that novelty brings.
Get those three apart and a curiosity assessment becomes useful. Leave them mixed and you end up rating enthusiasm, which is a different variable entirely.
Fascination and need are two different engines
Two motivations sit behind the same behaviour. One is the intrinsic pull of acquiring new information, which can run all the way to pleasure or obsession. The other is the identified need to close a gap in information you require, which can run all the way to frustration and discouragement.
The first group want to learn without end. The second group, whether they solve problems or select carefully, want to stay current on the knowledge their job actually demands.
A recruiter reading those two descriptions will usually reach for the first. Worth remembering that endless learners also get bored quickly and can point their appetite at every imaginable subject rather than the one they are paid for.
The second group can look disengaged by comparison. They also carry enough distance and self-awareness to identify their own gaps and to separate the information that strengthens their expertise from the information that merely occupies them.
The two appraisals that decide whether curiosity happens
Curiosity in any given moment depends on two rapid, automatic judgements. The first weighs how novel and interesting a situation is, and therefore whether it deserves attention at all. The second weighs whether you personally have the mental resources to handle it.
That second appraisal is where most workplace curiosity dies. An unfamiliar situation can be complex, uncertain, ambiguous and mildly dangerous to your standing, and a person who judges themselves short of resources will look away.
Both appraisals are influenced by context. Workload, psychological safety and how the last person who asked an awkward question was treated all feed directly into the second one.
Conscious curiosity and the manufactured kind
Deliberate curiosity is directed at something you have decided to understand. Perceptual curiosity is triggered from outside, and it is the variety that platforms engineer to keep you scrolling. Both feel like curiosity from the inside, and only one of them builds anything.
This distinction is barely used by researchers and I find it extremely useful in organisations. A team can be intensely stimulated all day and learn nothing, which is a state most of us recognise.
The five dimensions of professional curiosity
The five-dimensional model is the most useful structure currently available for understanding curiosity at work. It comes from Todd Kashdan and colleagues at George Mason University, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, and it builds on earlier curiosity inventories developed across the 2000s along with the character strengths work of Peterson and Seligman.
Kashdan’s team tested the model across a community survey, an online panel and a nationally representative household survey of 3,000 adults, finding evidence for five distinct factors. The five are set out below in the order I use them with client teams.
Joyous exploration
Joyous exploration is the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge, with the pleasure of learning as its own reward. This is the archetype most curiosity tests actually measure. It is the appetite that makes a person ask why, and it operates whether or not the knowledge will ever be used.
People scoring high here are more open to new experience, show more initiative, and stay with a learning opportunity longer. They draw positive emotion from the search itself rather than from closing a gap.
Of all five dimensions, this one has the strongest link with the belief that a life well lived means learning continuously and helping others do the same. That connection is what makes curiosity an interpersonal motivation rather than a private hobby. My curiosity matrix maps where that appetite currently points.
Deprivation sensitivity
Deprivation sensitivity is curiosity driven by frustration rather than pleasure. It shows up when someone works on a hard problem or hunts down information they know they are missing. The reward arrives as relief when the gap closes, which gives this dimension a distinctly different emotional tone.
People scoring high here engage intellectually with complex or abstract ideas and with problems that block them. The dimension measures the capacity to notice a knowledge gap, run an investigation and fill it.
Two consequences matter at work. This dimension has the weakest link with managing the stress of the unknown, because narrowing attention onto one missing answer makes the blockage more uncomfortable. It also has the weakest link with innovation, since the task resembles completing a puzzle rather than starting from a blank page.
Seen from outside, a colleague high in deprivation sensitivity often reads as a perfectionist rather than as a curious person. That misreading costs organisations good analysts every year.
Stress tolerance
Stress tolerance is the willingness to accept the doubt, confusion and anxiety that arrive with anything genuinely new. People scoring high here are less discouraged when they explore unfamiliar territory, and they recover faster when the exploration goes badly.
This dimension has the strongest correlation with every measure of wellbeing tested, including happiness, meaning, sense of competence, autonomy and positive emotion. It also influences how the other dimensions convert into wellbeing, which makes it the quiet gatekeeper of the whole model.
Facing something new, people with high stress tolerance can judge both whether the subject is worth their attention and whether they can handle it intellectually. Remove psychological safety from a workplace and this is the dimension you damage first. It is also the joy of stretching a comfort zone, which is familiar territory for the iconoclasts I interview.
Social curiosity
Social curiosity is the desire to know what other people think and feel, pursued by listening, asking and socialising. It is an efficient information strategy and it rests on three separate dynamics, only one of which most organisations notice.
- Empathy, meaning the willingness to understand a person through what they are going through by placing yourself intellectually in their position.
- Interest in others, pursued by observing and asking questions, or by listening to conversations and collecting second-hand information.
- Openness to other people’s ideas, which matters most because it means the person engages with an idea before working out who produced it.
That third dynamic separates a curious colleague from an office gossip. One is collecting ideas and the other is collecting people.
Openness to other people’s ideas combined with stress tolerance are the two dimensions that predict a person’s satisfaction and engagement most consistently. Social curiosity on its own shows no correlation with wellbeing at all.
Thrill seeking
Thrill seeking is the pursuit of varied, novel, complex and intense experience, extending to physical, social and financial risk. People scoring highest here find their reward in being at the centre of attention and in being seen as capable of living an adventurous life.
Of the five dimensions this one carries the sharpest double edge. High scorers are more exposed to addiction and to aggression, and they also tend to make effective managers in complex and volatile environments such as entrepreneurship, the military and emergency services.
Australian organisations tend to select thrill seeking out of their leadership pipelines without ever deciding to. Risk-averse promotion criteria do it quietly, and the capability is missed precisely when conditions turn volatile.
Field note
The lowest scorer in the room ran the best question
I ran the curiosity assessment with a management group and debriefed the results in the room. One participant scored low on every dimension, and the group’s reaction was immediate and slightly cruel. He took it well, then asked the only question of the session that changed anything.
He wanted to know what the organisation had ever done with a question raised by someone at his level. Nobody could answer. He then explained that he had scored honestly on an instrument asking about his behaviour at work, and that his behaviour outside work included restoring a boat and reading obsessively about marine engines. His curiosity was intact. He had simply stopped bringing it through the front door, and he could name the year he stopped.
A low curiosity score measures a relationship between a person and their workplace rather than a property of the person. Before you develop anyone, find out what happened to the last question they asked.
The six professional curiosity profiles
Treating the five dimensions as a single profile produces recognisable types. Kashdan’s team identified four in their nationally representative sample: The Fascinated, Problem Solvers, Empathizers and Avoiders. Working with Australian and international client teams I use two additional profiles, the Adventurer and the Selective, which the original research does not separate out.
You can assess your own curiosity profile at work here. One warning before you read the six descriptions. Kashdan’s own paper argues explicitly against treating people as a single population running from incurious to very curious, and the two lower-scoring profiles are the ones most often misread as character flaws.
The Fascinated
The Fascinated are on a permanent hunt for knowledge, and they are the caricature most people picture when they hear the word curious. Scores sit high and balanced across every dimension, and the thirst for new subjects leaves them little choice but to keep exploring in order to reach their own potential.
They have an inquiring mind. They can be introverted socially and they stand out through strong values and a sense of justice, and they are not easily stressed by the unknown.
They show a wide spread of interests and spend heavily in time, attention, energy and money on satisfying them. They are the profile most likely to suffer from what the Japanese call tsundoku, the habit of buying more books than you will ever read.
Breadth often makes them creators and innovators rather than experts, and the same breadth exposes them to imposter syndrome. At work they will generate the most improvement ideas and show the least interest in implementing them.
The Problem Solver
Problem Solvers are curious in order to reach a goal rather than to wander. They score high on deprivation sensitivity, moderate on stress tolerance and low on social curiosity, and they are distinguished by how strongly they react to an obstacle, a problem or an identified knowledge gap.
Put simply, The Fascinated collect books and Problem Solvers do crosswords.
Given the choice, a Problem Solver will research their way out of a frustrating problem rather than talk about life with a friend. They value autonomy more than the other profiles and are driven by the impulse to eliminate a gap they have identified.
They rarely choose their own area of expertise, since the problem in front of them decides the subject. They are hard workers who ask nobody for anything if they can avoid it, which is exactly the pattern that carries them toward burnout. Leaving a Problem Solver alone with a problem for too long is a management decision with consequences.
The Adventurer
The Adventurer scores high on thrill seeking and moderate elsewhere, and carries the psychological strength to explore new territory without a long-term plan. This is one of the two profiles I add to Kashdan’s four, because thrill seeking behaves distinctively enough in a workplace to deserve its own description.
Adventurers make inspiring leaders who live in doing rather than in thinking. For them a good idea is a realised idea, and they hold up well under complex or volatile conditions.
Socially they are extraverted, hedonistic and good company, and being around them is an experience in itself. Their expertise is cultural before it is technical, and it comes from a difficult situation they got through rather than from a book they read. Their range of interests is narrower than The Fascinated and their enthusiasm travels further.
The Empathiser
Empathisers score high on social curiosity, lower on stress tolerance and low on thrill seeking. Their primary interest is other people, in their emotional, social and behavioural dimensions, and the label undersells how much analytical work that involves.
They describe themselves as easily stressed by the unknown and by being observed, and they are the most motivated to show that their life is under control. Listening and curiosity about others rank among their strongest values.
Fairly introverted by nature, Empathisers prefer to observe in order to understand, and their need to prepare in advance makes them quietly admiring of Adventurers. In a team they are usually the first to notice that something has gone wrong for somebody, well before any system reports it.
The Selective
The Selective score moderate or below across all five dimensions and apply curiosity where their work requires it. This is the second profile I add to Kashdan’s four, and it is the one most often misjudged, because low scores on an instrument about workplace behaviour get read as a statement about the person.
They describe themselves as fairly introverted, cautious about novelty and change, and easily stressed. Their passions are often present and either sit outside work or have never been noticed and valued inside it.
Their real talent is calibration. They understand precisely when and on which subject curiosity is required to stay safe professionally, and they spend it there. They will attend training when a manager asks and they will not necessarily bring enthusiasm with them.
Before treating this profile as a development problem, look at what the organisation has done with the last three ideas raised from that level. The answer usually explains the score.
The Avoider
Avoiders return the lowest scores across all five dimensions, particularly stress tolerance. They accounted for roughly one in five people in Kashdan’s nationally representative sample, which makes this a substantial share of any Australian workforce rather than a rare exception.
At work they seek neither challenges nor reasons to progress. They do the job as well as they can and attend training when there is no remaining alternative, and many concluded a long time ago that learning was not meant for them.
Low stress tolerance shows up as avoidance of confrontation and difficulty naming their own emotions. It can also show up as guarding knowledge, which reads as obstruction and is usually protection.
This is the profile where a deficit reading does the most damage. The conclusion that learning is not for them was formed somewhere, often at school and often reinforced at work, and it responds to conditions rather than to encouragement.
How to use a curiosity profile without turning it into a label
A curiosity profile is useful for designing work and dangerous for sorting people. The same result can support a conversation about what someone needs, or become a permanent tag attached to their name in a talent review. The difference lies entirely in who holds the result and what they are allowed to do with it.
Four uses compared
The four common uses of a curiosity assessment differ in who sees the result and in whether the outcome changes a person or changes their work. Only the last of the four alters the conditions the score was measuring in the first place, which is why it is also the least popular.
| Use | Who holds the result | Its blind spot | When it is appropriate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selection and recruitment | The employer | Screens for The Fascinated and quietly filters out profiles that suit the actual work better | Rarely, and only alongside evidence of what the role genuinely requires |
| Individual self-awareness | The individual | Produces insight with no mechanism to act on it | Career conversations and coaching, where the person controls the outcome |
| Team composition | The team, collectively | Becomes typecasting if the profiles are recorded and revisited | Forming a project team, discussed once and not filed |
| Work and job design | The manager, with the person | Slow, and it exposes decisions leaders would rather not revisit | Whenever low scores cluster in one function, level or site |
The signal that tells you the score is about the workplace
Scores that cluster by function, by level or by site are describing an environment rather than a set of individuals. Personality does not distribute itself neatly along an org chart. When the low scores gather in one place, the place is the finding.
- Low stress tolerance concentrated in one team, which usually points to how mistakes were handled there.
- Low social curiosity across a whole site, which usually points to shift patterns and physical layout.
- High deprivation sensitivity with low joyous exploration, which usually points to a workload that leaves room for closing gaps and none for wandering.
- Scores that fall with tenure, which is the clearest evidence you have that the organisation is the variable.
Work out who is actually allowed to be curious in your organisation
A profile explains the person. The permission structure explains the score. Read my method for auditing who currently holds the curiosity licence in your organisation, and run the six checks before you assess a single team member.
How I can help you work with professional curiosity
I use the curiosity assessment as a conversation opener rather than as a sorting tool. The work usually runs from a team debrief, where people see their own profile and the pattern across the group, through to redesigning the conditions that produced the pattern in the first place.
Assessment debriefs and team workshops
A debrief works best with an intact team rather than a mixed cohort, because the value sits in the pattern rather than in any one result. Seeing five dimensions spread unevenly across a team changes how people interpret a colleague they had privately written off.
I run these sessions with one rule stated up front. Results belong to the individual, and no profile leaves the room attached to a name.
Keynotes, manager communities and leadership programmes
A keynote suits a leadership group that treats curiosity as a hiring criterion and has not yet examined what happens to it after induction. Manager communities suit organisations that have run the assessment and want the practice to survive past the first busy quarter.
For organisations going further, I design programmes connecting curiosity to enableship, the leadership of innovation, which is my own frame for the work a leader does to make other people’s contribution possible.
Conclusion: professional curiosity at work is measurable and it is not a verdict
Five dimensions and six profiles give you a far better instrument than the single scale running from incurious to very curious. They tell you what drives a person, what exhausts them, and what kind of work will hold their attention past the first fortnight.
They do not tell you who is worth developing. A low score describes a relationship between a person and a workplace, measured on one day, in one job, under one manager.
Use the profiles to design better work and better conversations. Refuse to use them as a sorting hat, and professional curiosity at work becomes something your organisation can actually grow rather than something it merely recruits.
Adapted from The Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people, by Kashdan and colleagues in the Journal of Research in Personality, and from Curiosity has comprehensive benefits in the workplace by the same research team.
Frequently asked questions about professional curiosity at work
What are the five dimensions of curiosity?
Joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, social curiosity and thrill seeking. The model comes from Kashdan and colleagues in the Journal of Research in Personality. Each dimension relates differently to wellbeing, innovation and tenacity, so a single curiosity rating hides more than it reveals.
Can you measure professional curiosity at work reliably?
You can measure the five dimensions reliably with a validated instrument. What you cannot do is read the result as a fixed trait, because scores respond to workload, psychological safety and what happened to the last question the person asked. Measure conditions alongside people.
Should employers recruit for curiosity?
Screening for curiosity usually means screening for The Fascinated, which suits exploratory roles and fits operational ones badly. Problem Solvers and Selectives often outperform in work with defined outputs. Decide what the role genuinely requires before you attach a curiosity criterion to it.
What does a low curiosity score actually mean?
It describes behaviour in a specific workplace rather than a person’s capacity. Low scorers frequently maintain intense curiosity outside work. If low scores cluster in one team, level or site, the environment is the finding, and development programmes will not shift it.
