A Longitudinal Examination of Personality at Work: Examining the Relationship Between Variability in Personality and Job Performance and Turnover Intentions

The present study examined the relationship between variability in personality and important organizational outcomes, including multi-faceted job performance and turnover intentions. Furthermore, this study tested the mediating effects of self-esteem, anxiety, leader-member exchange, and job satisfaction. Finally, various situational contingencies were examined as a potential source of Big Five personality states. Experience sampling methodology was used to repeatedly measure working participants’ state personality over the course of two weeks. Self and other (i.e., coworker or supervisor) performance ratings were collected. Results showed that variability in a general factor of personality had statistically significant relationships with anxiety, leader-member exchange, job satisfaction, and selfrated counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Furthermore, results showed statistically significant indirect paths from variability in personality to self-rated CWBs, through job satisfaction and anxiety. These results were not seen for other-ratings of CWBs. Additional models were tested on the individual facets of the Big Five, with conscientiousness and neuroticism showing statistically significant relationships to multiple mediators and outcomes. Finally, the situational contingency results showed a statistically significant relationship from friendliness of interactions to state extraversion and state agreeableness. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications as the field begins to move past static conceptualizations of personality. 3 VARIABILITY IN PERSONALITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE A Longitudinal Examination of Personality at Work: Examining the Relationship between Variability in Personality and Job Performance and Turnover Intentions Personality research, as it applies to organizations, has gone through a number of changes in the past 40 years. An implicit assumption of this research has been that personality constructs are stable enough to be useful as predictors of important outcome variables, such as performance and turnover. Much effort has been devoted to defining and measuring such constructs, but the question as to their stability on a daily basis generally has been neglected. A primary focus of the present research was therefore to contribute to our knowledge regarding the issue of stability of personality and how such stability, or a lack thereof, may relate to outcomes. Personality Research: Taxonomies and Faking Early organizational research on personality seemed to conclude that human behavior was so complicated that numerous different constructs would be needed to adequately explain personality (see Chernyshenko, Stark, & Drasgow, 2011 for a review). There were literally hundreds of studies that examined many similar, but slightly distinct, constructs (e.g., the 16PF; Cattell, Eber & Tatsuoka, 1970). This resulted in a variety of different findings, which made it hard to conclude much of anything about the impact of personality on organizational outcomes. An influential review article by Guion and Gottier (1965) argued that there was little evidence of the validity of personality constructs, and as a result there was an extended period during which relatively little research was conducted on personality in organizations. Fortunately, researchers were not content, and several more recent review articles found that all personality constructs could be organized into a relatively parsimonious 4 VARIABILITY IN PERSONALITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE taxonomy of conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience (Costa & McCrae 1988; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1990). These Big Five personality traits helped rejuvenate research on personality in organizations as they presented a comprehensible and organized way to study personality. Research has shown that the Big Five personality constructs are predictive of a wide variety of important organizational outcomes (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Oswald & Hough, 2011). Emerging as most important in an organizational context is conscientiousness. Although definitions of conscientiousness tend to vary (see Roberts, Chernyshenko, Stark & Goldberg, 2005), the construct is most often associated with thorough, careful, and detail-oriented thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. Conscientiousness has been shown to be a moderately strong predictor of future task performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Dudley, Orvis, Lebiecki, & Cortina, 2006), organizational citizenship behaviors (Borman, Penner, Allen & Motowidlo, 2001; Organ & Ryan, 1995), counterproductive work behaviors (Berry, Ones, & Sackett, 2007), team processes and outcomes (Barrick, Mount, & Judge; 2001; Peeters, Van Tuijl, Rutte, & Reymen, 2006), employee attitudes (Christian, Garza, Slaughter, 2011; Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), and leadership (Bono & Judge, 2004), among other organizational outcomes. The rest of the Big Five, particularly agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism, are seen by many as “niche” predictors that are related to some organizational outcomes, but certainly not all. For example, agreeableness has been found to be the number one predictor of team processes (Barrick et al., 2001), while openness is the number one predictor of training outcomes (Barrick & Mount, 1991). 5 VARIABILITY IN PERSONALITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE Many criticize the usefulness of personality in organizational settings, often citing low criterion-related validity. For example, some of the experts featured in Morgeson et al. (2007) argued that the use of personality tests in selection should cease until the field can strengthen the predictive validity of these selection methods. While a decade has passed since this article was published, many of the problems they discuss still persist. For example, Morgeson et al. (2007) noted that the broad nature of the Big Five has led to relatively modest criterion-related validity in that even the best measures of personality rarely explain more than 15% of the variance in performance. They also noted that this predictive ability could be improved by looking at narrow personality constructs that are tailored to a specific situation. Some researchers have found success pursuing this exact idea. Hough and Oswald (2008) argued that mid-level personality constructs are the key to developing useful personality measures, and studies have supported these arguments. Dudley et al. (2006) conducted a meta-analysis and found that lower level facets of conscientiousness could often predict various criteria better than a global measure. An additional meta-analysis by Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, and Crawford (2013) took it a step further by looking at lower level facets of each of the Big Five, and found that combinations of the narrow facets were more predictive of overall job performance, task performance, and contextual performance than were broad traits. Today, many researchers agree that personality traits should be viewed as a hierarchy, with large constructs like the Big Five resting at the top, and more engrained constructs residing at the bottom (Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon & Crawford, 2013; Hough & Oswald, 2011). As previous studies have shown, there are ways to improve the validity of personality tests by matching lower level constructs to specific criteria. However, a 6 VARIABILITY IN PERSONALITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE number of other recommendations have been presented to strengthen the criterion-related validity of personality tests. For example, many believe that faking hurts validity (Dwight & Donovan, 2003; Fan, Gao, Carroll, Lopez, Tian, & Meng, 2012; Lammers, Macan, Hirtz, & Kim, 2014; van Hooft & Born, 2012). Those who believe faking is a concern often note that personality tests should theoretically predict future job performance because individuals with an appropriate level of a personality trait (as determined by a job analysis) will perform better on a job than individuals without that same level of the personality trait. Thus, if an individual without a certain level of a trait fakes a test and receives the position, he or she could be displacing a person who had a more appropriate level of the personality trait and would have performed better had he or she received the job offer. Researchers have created a number of different ways to combat personality test faking, including warnings (Dwight & Donovan, 2003; Lammers et al., 2014), social desirability scales, bogus items, the use of other reports (Oh, Wang, & Mount, 2011), and eye tracking software (van Hooft & Born, 2012). Although some of these methods have been effective in reducing applicant faking (Dwight & Donovan, 2003; Lammers et al., 2014), evidence shows that even when respondents should have absolutely no motivation to fake, such as when the tests are taken for research purposes, the relationship between personality and future job performance is still modest at best (Schmidt & Ryan, 1992). Thus, it seems there is a need for a fundamental change in the way the field thinks about personality testing in order for research to truly obtain progress.