Can Personality Affect Job Performance?
Can personality affect job performance? Organizations honing employee talent identification and selection crave information connecting personality to performance. Individuals seeking the right vocation might benefit from this same knowledge.
Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, is trying to answer this question. His research focuses on the theoretical structure and applied assessment of personality traits associated with success at work. Recently, Wilmot and his colleague Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, conducted two studies on the effect of personality traits and job performance. The first study combined multiple meta analyses of the so called Big Five personality traits – conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and neuroticism. For the second study Wilmot and One drilled deeper and focused on one trait – agreeableness.
Welcome, Michael. Thank you very much for being here.
Michael Wilmot: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it. Glad to be here.
MM: Before we get into the details of the two studies, can you tell us a little bit about the Big 5 personality traits? What are these, and where do they come from?
MW: Sure, I’ll provide a little helpful context. So one of the major roles of science is the development of a comprehensive yet a parsimonious taxonomy. Taxonomies advance science by giving researchers a common language for describing the entities under study. They allow us to measure and predict variables. And then they can act as a basis for building theory. So with that in mind, developing a consensual taxonomy of personality traits is arguably the most important contribution of personality psychology to the wider behavioral sciences. So the Big 5 trait taxonomy, sometimes called the five factor model, posits that personality differs across five major dimensions. The first is emotional stability or its converse neuroticism. The second is agreeableness, the third is conscientiousness, the fourth extraversion and the final one is openness. These five traits… they’re pretty robust. They emerge across sexes, ages, races, inventories, languages and cultures, so it’s a pretty good and generalizable taxonomy that we can use.
MM: Let’s talk about the studies. The first one looked at the Big 5 personality traits. What were your goals with this study? Tell us also how you set it up and what you found.
MW: Sure, well, personality predicts performance, job performance, and that’s like the main dependent variable… well, one of the main ones in management. Does this predict performance on the job? And personality does, but one of the things that, frankly has been overlooked is the nature of the job. You know, think of, think of the practicalities of getting a study sample run. You could… let’s say you can get a bunch of individuals doing the same job. So let’s say they’re teachers or managers, and how does personality predict for those people in that job? Another way is trying to get a cross sample of people, a lot of different folks in different jobs, and how does personality predict performance across all those jobs? That’s.. that answers other questions, but it’s hard to answer both questions at the same time. And most previous meta-analyses have been focusing on overall job performance across all different jobs. And what we care about, just like I was talking about in the academic performance examples, maybe the job matters to which traits predict more or less or at all. So that’s what we try to explore is, using existing meta-analyses, what do we know about how personality functions across different occupations? And we were able to gather a handful of meta-analyses and organize them across nine different occupational groups, helped by the Standard Occupational Classification system from the Department of Labor that they have major groups. That’s our highest category. So it roughly explains a good portion of the economy. It’s the best we can do. So we looked at how the Big 5 traits function across every occupation and then specific occupations. But another thing we wanted to look at was what is it about those occupations that matters? What is different about them? What do those occupations specifically require? So an occupational requirement, or like… What are the tasks and responsibilities that are relevant in that job? So when you’re a nurse, it’s in a personal care and helping. It’s an important part of job. When it’s sales, it’s about interpersonal influence. Same thing with being manager. So these characteristics or the requirements of the job sometimes match up better with personality traits, and sometimes they don’t match up as well. And you would think that if there’s a good match, you’re going to have a stronger prediction. And so we were able to get some data from ONET, it’s also another Department of Labor website. It’s the Occupational Information Network, and it has information about all jobs in the US economy. So we were able to take occupational requirements information from there, as well as a second variable that we cared about is how complex is the job? Occupational complexity matters, and complexity refers to like the job demand, the cognitive demands associated with the job. And they can be ranked on a scale less to more demanding. So we looked at two different… We look at different occupations and then we look at these two variables of complexity. How does that impact things? And then the match of requirements to these traits. So that’s the setup.
We found overall that personality predicts across jobs, and it predicts very differently within each of these jobs. The biggest, I’d say the most generalizable finding, is this trait called conscientiousness, which refers to your dependability achievement striving, your organization, this predicts across all jobs. That was an interesting finding. And then other jobs… The second major finding is that other jobs are are better predicted when the relationship match is stronger. So, for instance, agreeableness, which has to do with helping and care, predicts very well in healthcare occupations, which involves interpersonal helping, and care. Extraversion, which is trait which is about assertiveness and influence of others, is a strong predictor in sales and management.
MM: Two of the personality traits that you mentioned, kind of come out, I guess saliently, are conscientiousness and agreeableness. The second study you focused on the personality trait of agreeableness. Why did you give attention to this single trait, and what did you find in this study?
MW: That’s a great question too. So my dissertation was a second-order, quantitative review of the Big 5 traits. So it’s like, hat do we know? From all possible meta-analyses that exist out there for all the Big 5… I should say that is about 200 meta-analyses with over three or 400 variables, but the cool part about it is I’ve been able to publish a paper about each individual trait. So I have an extraversion paper, I have a conscientiousness paper, and now it was time to do an agreeableness paper.
Agreeableness is in an interesting variable. The name doesn’t necessarily give it away, so I think it’s helpful to have a prototype. So the prototypical agreeable person is someone who’s sympathetic, considerate, truthful, supportive, and generally gets other people to like him, whereas the prototypical disagreeable person is someone who these critical, skeptical, hostile, condescending, and even manipulative of others. So we wanted to see how agreeableness impacts variables both at work and broader life outcomes – stuff like health and relationship satisfaction, marital satisfaction, etc. I guess the first major finding is we looked at 275 different variables and across 93% of them, agreeableness showed relations in a desirable direction. So what that means, practically, is people who were higher in agreeableness tended to be happier, more psychologically healthy, they report, more positive and more supportive relationships with others both inside and outside the workplace. They collaborate better with others and tend to be effective leaders. Importantly, also is they’re less likely to engage in counterproductive behaviors like cheating, stealing, and aggression. But 275 variables is a lot of variables, and we want to try to concisely summarize like what do we know? How can we distill this? So we were able to distill these findings, especially agreeableness’s strongest relationships into a set of themes. So we have eight themes that kind of characterize the functioning of agreeableness. And you can read about these in both your article summarizing my paper as well as the paper itself, but I’ll just give a brief fly over of these themes. One is like an individual focus and be like into the individuals who are higher in agreeableness, they’re more motivated to show care and concern for others and engage in self transcending practices in their lives, including religious and spiritual practices. And they just tend to be more content with life. So that’s kind of individual oriented. As far as interpersonal orientation, these folks tend to seek and cultivate and maintain positive relationships with others, whether it’s spouses, subordinates, peers and supervisors. They are characterized by strong, rich relationships. Now, in terms of the workplace and their orientation, higher agreeable people – or people who are higher in agreeableness, rather – are more willing and able to work well with others and accomplish collective goals. Teamwork is a great application for such folks. They invest in their work. But they can… tend to be a bit lenient towards others. We’re evaluating whether it’s their peers or their leaders because they prioritize people over performance overall, so it’s best then that these folks work together in team. And finally, because higher agreeable people tend to follow norms and rules, and avoid misbehavior, they tend to be welcomed and integrated quickly into new groups and organizations. So you can kind of see why these individuals would be a little bit more effective in life. The only downside here though, and I think it’s also important, is although agreeableness is generally helpful, it does have its hindrances, specifically people who are more agreeable can sometimes be unassertive, and they can maybe tend to avoid conflict sometimes and not stand up for themselves and be taken advantage of. Relatedly, they tend to be also associated with lower extrinsic success, so they may not be getting the promotions because frankly they don’t seek the promotions, as often they may have a lower salary because they may not be less… They can be effective negotiators, but they don’t necessarily want to get involved in negotiation process, so to speak, so I guess a practical application of this paper is, if you’re a manager and you’re working with good, agreeable people, help those who are helping you. Look out for them. Give them that salary opportunity. Give them the raise given opportunity for promotion or ask them about that. They may be less likely to seek it out themselves, because they’re too busy and focused on self-transcendence and trying to help others.
MM: Exactly. Well, Michael, thank you very much for being with us here on Short Talks from the Hill and we look forward to talking to you some more about your research in the future.
MW: I look forward to that opportunity too, Matt. Thanks so much. Thank you.
MM: Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.
