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Personality
| Big 5 Personality Traits | Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism |
| Openness | Being curious, original, intellectual, creative, and open to new ideas. highly motivated to learn new skills, and they do well in training settings |
| Conscientiousness | Being organized, systematic, punctual, achievement oriented, and dependable. the one personality trait that uniformly predicts how high a person’s performance will be, across a variety of occupations and jobs |
| Extraversion | Being outgoing, talkative, sociable, and enjoying social situations. tend to be effective as managers and they demonstrate inspirational leadership behaviors |
| Agreeableness | Being affable, tolerant, sensitive, trusting, kind, and warm. agreeable people help others at work consistently, and this helping behavior is not dependent on being in a good mood |
| Neuroticism | Being anxious, irritable, temperamental, and moody. tendency to have emotional adjustment problems and experience stress and depression on a habitual basis |
| MBTI | Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - classifies people in 4 distinct dimensions (16 possible types) |
| MBTI Dimensions | Extraversion/Introversion; Sensing/iNtuition; Thinking/Feeling; Judgement/Perception |
| Positive/Negative Affectivity | positive moods (happier at life & work) vs negative moods frequency |
| Self Monitoring | person is capable of monitoring his or her actions and appearance in social situations. who understand what the situation demands and act accordingly. low social monitors act the way they feel. rated as higher performers, and emerge as leaders |
| Proactive personality | a person’s inclination to fix what is perceived as wrong, change the status quo, and use initiative to solve problems. more successful over the course of their careers, as they use initiative and acquire understanding of the politics in the organization |
| self-esteem | is the degree to which a person has overall positive feelings about his or herself. People with high self-esteem view themselves in a positive light, are confident, and respect themselves |
| self-efficacy | is a belief that one can perform a specific task successfully. Research shows that the belief that we can do something is a good predictor of whether we can actually do it |
| Locus of control | degree to which people feel accountable for their own behaviors. high internal locus of control = control their own destiny and what happens to them is their own doing, high external locus of control = things happen to them because of other people, luck, |
Rawpixel / Pxhere
Personality psychologists tend to divide personality into five core dimensions: openness to experiences, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.
Any guesses as to which dimension might be most predictive of occupational performance? If you guessed extraversion, you’d be wrong. If you guessed emotional stability, you’d be wrong again.
The truth is that 100+ years of psychological research has shown conscientiousness – that is, the tendency toward self-efficacy, orderliness, achievement, and self-discipline – to be the best predictor of job performance. New research forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers an in-depth examination of why this is the case, and when it might not be true.
A team of scientists led by Michael Wilmot of the University of Toronto conducted a meta-analysis of 92 studies to explore the relationship between conscientiousness and various occupational variables (for example, on-the-job competence, procrastination, leadership, organizational commitment, adaptability, job satisfaction, and burnout, to name a few).
Across variables, the researchers found strong evidence to support the view that conscientiousness is highly predictive of job performance.
“Conscientiousness refers to individual differences in the tendency to be hard- working, orderly, responsible to others, self-controlled, and rule abiding,” state Wilmot and his team. “We present the most comprehensive, quantitative review and synthesis of the occupational effects of conscientiousness available in the literature. Results show conscientiousness has effects in a desirable direction for 98% of variables [...], indicative of a potent, pervasive influence across occupational variables.”
Although the relationship between conscientiousness and job performance is robust, the researchers identified some interesting caveats and boundary conditions. For example, they found that conscientiousness is a weaker predictor of job performance in “high-complexity” occupations (think, for instance, of professions that require a high degree of brain power such as an analyst or lawyer). It is the low- to moderate-complexity occupations – for example, customer service jobs – that are particularly well suited to the conscientious personality.
Furthermore, the researchers found that individuals high in conscientiousness do better in Health Care than, say, Law Enforcement (although conscientious individuals show above average job performance in both occupational sectors). The graph below reveals the job sectors in which conscientious individuals are most likely to excel, with Health Care leading the pack.
"Summary of meta-analyses of conscientiousness and occupational performance [...]. Diamonds ... [+] represent estimated population correlations corrected for unreliability. Horizontal bars are 80% credibility intervals around each population correlation."
Wilmot & Ones (2019)The researchers suggest that organizations should do more to harness conscientious workers’ aptitudes and motivations. According to their analysis, conscientious individuals are motivated by status, acceptance, and predictability. Building organizational frameworks that allow conscientious individuals to pursue these needs is critical to maximizing their occupational potential.
The authors conclude, “Few individual differences variables have occupational effects as potent and pervasive as conscientiousness. Based on evidence from more than a century of occupational research, the vast treasure trove of findings [...] should motivate every individual, organizational, and societal decision maker to better understand, develop, and apply the valuable human capital resource that is conscientiousness.”