Category Archives: Personality

Who is More Likely to Change Careers?

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Topic: Personality
Publication: Journal of Vocational Behavior (2011)
Article:A longitudinal study of the determinants and outcomes of career change.
Authors: S. A. Carless & J. L. Arnup
Reviewed by: Charleen Maher

It’s no secret that we’re currently experiencing some rough economic times. Consequently, the job market is unstable and people are seeking additional education and training in an effort to prepare for career changes.  A career change is defined as moving to a different occupation or profession and often requires costly additional training and results in lost time and income. So what leads an individual down the path of a new career and what happens after a career change has occurred?

Using longitudinal data, the current study explored several predictors and outcomes of career change.  In terms of personality, individuals high in openness to experience and extraversion were more likely to change careers. In addition, younger individuals and males were more likely to change careers than older individuals or females. When it comes to human capital, individuals with more education, less occupational tenure, and a lack of job security were also more likely to change careers. Not surprisingly, thoughts about quitting and job search behavior were solid predictors of career change.

The current study also found that although not a significant predictor of career change, job satisfaction does improve after an individual changes careers; perceptions of job security also improved in the new career. Finally, higher salary expectations were not related to career change and salary increases were not found among individuals who changed careers.

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Waging WARS on Workplace Arrogance

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Topic: Performance, Personality, Self Efficacy
Publication: Human Performance
Article: Acting superior but actually inferior?: Correlates and consequences of workplace arrogance
Authors: R.E. Johnson, S.B. Silverman, A. Shyamsunder, H-Y Swee, O.B. Rodopman, E. Cho, and J. Bauer
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger 

It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all had to work with an arrogant coworker or supervisor at one time in our careers.  It’s also probably safe to say that these run-ins have been unpleasant and disruptive to our work.  Yet, while we arm-chair our theories about the effects of arrogance in the workplace, very little research is available to confirm (or disconfirm) our assumptions and anecdotal evidence.  That is, surprisingly little is known about the consequences of workplace arrogance and its relationship with job performance.

In an effort to facilitate research on workplace arrogance, Johnson et al. (2010) created a scale to measure workplace arrogance (the Workplace Arrogance Scale) with a conveniently clever acronym: WARS.  The authors conducted 4 independent studies to validate their newly created scale and explore the consequences of workplace arrogance.  According to the authors, arrogant employees have exaggerated perceptions of their self-importance and superiority.  At work, arrogant employees may manifest these inflated self-perceptions by discounting others’ ideas/contributions, belittling coworkers, asserting control even in situations beyond their area of expertise, etc. 

Johnson et al.’s findings point to a fascinating trend: while arrogant employees engage in behaviors that exude superiority, they actually appear to be less intelligent and receive lower performance ratings than employees who are less arrogant. 

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Exhausted Employees? They May be Reacting to Your Goal-Oriented Leadership

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Topic: Employee Satisfaction, Culture, Personality
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (NOV 2010)
Article: The Downside of Goal-Focused Leadership: The Role of Personality in Subordinate Exhaustion
Authors: S.J. Perry, L.A. Witt, L.M. Penney, and L. Atwater
Reviewed By: Mary Alice Crowe-Taylor

The heart of goal-focused leadership (GFL) is to elicit goal-oriented behavior from employees by emphasizing goal achievement. In theory, GFL should contribute to employee’s resources for handling stress at work by clarifying goals, suggesting ways to achieve goals, structuring tasks and verifying attainment. However, depending on the employee’s personality, this emphasis on goal achievement may or may not be perceived as supportive.

In employees who are less conscientious (less achievement oriented), can GFL cause exhaustion? Yes, if these employees also have low emotional stability. That is, if they are more often distracted by worry and are prone to pessimism. Inherently, these employees have the least “resources” to assist them, and goal-focused leadership may produce exhaustion, through an inability to cope with the stress demands.

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Wanted: Employees with High Work Locus of Control

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Topic: Personality, Job Attitudes
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JUL 2010)
Article: A Meta-Analytic Examination of Work and General Locus of Control
Authors: Wang, Q., Bowling, N. A. & Eschleman, K. J.
Reviewed By: Rachel Marsh

Locus of control is a personality trait that effects how a person views life. If a person has an internal locus of control; they believes their rewards and punishments occur because of choices they made.  If one has an external locus of control, they believe rewards and punishments are controlled by outside forces, people or fate.  General locus of control refers to one’s life, but people also have a work locus of control, and a person’s work locus of control has an effect on one’s attitude about one’s job.

In the current article Wang, and associates analyzed 184 research articles that tested locus of control. They suggest that work locus and general locus of control are different constructs – just because you have an internal general locus of control does not mean you have an internal work locus of control – and they have different effects on a person’s work performance.  Participants who had higher levels of internal work locus of control had higher levels of job commitment, job satisfaction, job performance and leadership initiation as well as lower levels of burnout, absenteeism, psychological strain, and role ambiguity versus people with high general internal locus of control. 

The results suggest that employers should remind employees that they are in control of their destiny within the company. Reward programs might also be implemented to recompense employees who have performed above and beyond the expectations of their job, to again remind employees that their actions affect them.

Wang, Q., Bowling, N. A. & Eschleman, K. J.  (2010).  A meta-analytic
examination of work and general locus of control.  Journal of applied
Psychology, 95,  761-768.

Maximizing the Predictive Power of Personality Measures

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Topic: Assessment, Personality
Publication: International Journal of Selection
and Assessment (JUN)
Article: Improving prediction of work
performance through frame-of-reference consistency: Empirical evidence using
openness to experience
Authors: V.L. Pace and M.T. Brannick
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

Although measures of personality are fairly common in employee selection and assessment contexts, research suggests that measures of various personality characteristics tend to be less predictive of job performance than other common selection go-to’s (e.g., cognitive ability tests, technical work sample tests). Typically, items on personality measures ask job applicants/employees to report on how they are/act in general, across many different contexts (e.g., home, work, school).

But, Pace and Brannick recently found that by simply framing personality items to fit the work context, one can improve the predictive power of the personality measure.  In their study, Pace and Brannick selected the personality characteristic of openness to experience which is not as commonly studied in selection and assessment contexts as personality characteristics such as conscientiousness.  Nevertheless, openness to experience may be very important for jobs that require high levels of creativity and novel problem solving.

Using a sample of 83 employees from various industries, Pace and Brannick compared the predictive power of a common openness to experience measure (NEO PI-R) and one that they created which specifically addresses employees’ tendencies at work.  Their results suggest that their work-focused measure of openness to experience was much more strongly related to supervisor ratings of employees’ creative performance than the general measure.

Pace and Brannick’s findings suggest personality measures that focus specifically on the workplace may predict work performance better than more general measures of personality for which the frame-of-reference is “all the time” as opposed to “at work”.  From a practical perspective, this makes sense since how we generally behave or are at work can be quite different from how we behave or tend to be in other contexts.
Pace, V.L. & Brannick, M.T. (2010). Improving prediction of work performance through
frame-of-reference consistency: Empirical evidence using openness to
experience. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 18(2), 230-235.

When Job Satisfaction Does (Doesn’t) Matter for Performance

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Topic: Performance, Personality
Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology (MAR 2010)
Article: Effects of job satisfaction and conscientiousness on extra-role behaviors
Authors: N.A. Bowling
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

It’s hard to overstate the importance of “extra-role behaviors” from an organizational perspective.  Extra-role behaviors are voluntary work behaviors (i.e., may not be explicitly required of employees), and they come in two basic flavors: organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). OCBs are intended to help the organization and/or its members (e.g., stay late to help a coworker), while CWBs are intended to harm the organization and/or its members (e.g., steal materials, sabotage another coworker).  As you might expect, both can have a big impact on the bottom line!

While it may seem intuitive that an employee’s level of job satisfaction would determine how often he/she engages in OCBs and CWBs, research suggests that job satisfaction and performance are only weakly related (at least when measured at the individual employee level).  Bowling (2010) recently found that this may be at least partially due to the fact that employees differ in their levels of conscientiousness.

Aside from being a manager’s dream, conscientious employees are generally hard working, attentive to detail, and well organized. In Bowling’s study of 209 employees working in a variety of organizations and industries, he found that job satisfaction was a strong predictor of certain OCBs (i.e., taking extra special care when performing job duties) for employees low in conscientiousness.  For employees high in conscientiousness, job satisfaction did not predict the occurrence of these OCBs because employees high in conscientiousness engage in lots of OCBs regardless of their level of job satisfaction.  Similarly, employees high in conscientiousness tend not to engage in many CWBs in general; thus, job satisfaction is a better predictor of CWBs for less conscientious employees.

Bowling’s results clearly support the use of conscientiousness measures in employee selection.  Weeding out job applicants who score low on conscientiousness can pay off in terms of more OCBs and fewer CWBs.  But, for current employees who happen to be low in conscientiousness, organizational interventions intended to improve employee job satisfaction may be particularly useful.

Bowling, N. A. (2010). Effects of job satisfaction and conscientiousness on extra-role behaviors. Journal of Business and Psychology, 25, 119-130.

What Makes for a Successful Employee and Why?

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Topic: Job Performance, Personality
Publication: Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (MAR 2010)
Article: Human capital and objective indicators of career success: The mediating effects of cognitive ability and conscientiousness
Authors: T.W.H. Ng and D.C. Feldman
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

Career success is important for determining an employee’s well-being, life satisfaction, and can also contribute to organizational success.  While it is well known that an employee’s level of education and work experience influences his/her career success, Ng and Feldman suggest that why this relationship exists is unclear.

According to Ng and Feldman, education and work experience are indicators of an employee’s human capital (i.e., competencies possessed by employees that positively influence performance).  Such indicators of human capital signal to organizations that employees/job applicants posses valued competencies and will likely be successful on the job.

In a recent meta-analysis, Ng and Feldman argue that education can actually increase employees’cognitive ability which in turn enhances job performance. They argue further that work experience and attaining a high level of formal education leads employees to develop better work habits (i.e., become more conscientious) which is also a well known predictor of job performance.

Ng and Feldman’s results suggest that these indicators of human capital directly and positively influence objective indicators of employee career success (salaries and promotions).  However, investments in human capital development also appear to increase employee cognitive ability and conscientiousness and thus affect career success indirectly as well.

Caution: While Ng and Feldman argue that education and work experience lead to cognitive ability and conscientiousness, the opposite could also be the case.  This would suggest that smarter and more conscientious people seek out more education and tend to stay with their organizations longer which is also quite plausible and probably true to some degree.

These results lend support to the common practice of screening job applicants based on their education and work experiences prior to testing and/or interviewing.  This initial step can save significant time and money and can effectively screen out applicants that do not possess the human capital necessary for successful job performance.  Ng and Feldman also suggest that organizations make “tradeoffs” between work experience and education since applicants who attend school longer have fewer opportunities to gain work experience.  Weeding out applicants with high levels of education because they do not possess certain work experiences may be cutting applicants who DO possess the necessary human capital for good performance.

Ng, T. W. H., & Feldman, D. C. (2010). human capital and objective indicators of career success: the mediating effects of cognitive ability and conscientiousness . Journal of Occupation and Organizational Psychology, 83, 207-235.

Predicting Job Performance with Implicit Words Games?

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Topic: Personality, Measurement, Job Performance
Publication: Personnel Psychology (SPRING 2010)
Article: We (sometimes) know not how we feel: Predicting job performance with an implicit measure of trait affectivity
Authors: R.E. Johnson, A.L. Tolentino, O.B., Rodopman, and E. Cho
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

In the world of emotions, trait affect refers to the predisposition some people have to generally experience positive or negative emotions.

Trait affect is often broken up into Negative Affect (NA) and Positive Affect (PA). While high levels of NA are associated with negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, high levels of PA are associated with positive emotions such as excitement and joy.  It should not come as a surprise that PA tends to relate favorably to work performance whereas the opposite is true for NA.

Recently, Johnson, Tolentino, Rodopman, and Cho (2010) suggested that because trait affect (e.g., PA & NA) operates outside of employees’ conscious awareness, it is more appropriate to measure it at the unconscious or implicit level.  This is in stark contrast to the self-report, explicit measurement of trait affect that is typically used when explicitly asking people to rate the extent to which they feel certain emotions across many different situations.

But how in the heck would you measure trait affect implicitly?  Johnson et al. used a word completion task that presented word fragments to employees for which they were required to complete to create a meaningful English word.  The following are actual examples of word fragments used by Johnson and colleagues:

F E _ _ (NA = FEAR, or neutral = FEEL, FEED) S M _ _ _ (PA = SMILE, or neutral = SMART, SMOKE)

A person’s level of trait NA and PA were determined by the relative amount of NA-related and PA-related word fragments completed by employees, respectively.  But, don’t worry if you are a bit skeptical; this is not exactly your everyday personnel survey!

Nevertheless, Johnson and colleagues conducted two independent pilot studies that supported the validity of their word fragment approach. Ultimately, Johnson and colleagues demonstrated that implicit measures of trait affect are important predictors of task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), even more so than the conscious/explicit measures that we are more accustomed to. Johnson et al.’s study highlights an interesting way to measure employees’ predispositions to experience positive and negative emotions.

Moreover, while employees can easily misrepresent themselves on explicit personality measures, this is likely not possible for implicit measures.

Johnson, R.E., Tolentino, A.L., Rodopman, O.B., & Cho, E. (2010). We (sometimes) know not how we feel: Predicting job performance with an implicit measure of trait affectivity. Personnel Psychology, 63 (1), 197-219.

 

Can Personality Lead to Better Performance?

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Topic: Motivation, Personality, Job Performance
Publication: Personality and Individual Differences (MAR 2009)
Article: Using a two-factor theory of achievement motivation to examine performance-based outcomes and self-regulatory processes.
Authors: Story, P.A., Hart, J.W., Stasson, M.F., & Mahoney, J.M.
Reviewed By: Samantha Paustian-Underdahl

Have you ever wondered why some employees seem to find it easier to achieve their organizational goals than others? Current research proposes that theories of achievement motivation can explain some of  these employee differences. Achievement motivation refers to the tendency to set and work toward personal goals and/or standards (Cassidy & Lynn, 1989). It can be broken down into two motivational factors: intrinsic achievement motivation (IAM) and extrinsic achievement motivation (EAM) (Ryan & Deci, 2000). While researchers agree that achievement motivation is a complicated concept, many disagree about how it differs amongst employees.

Researchers debate how individuals who are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated may differ in their self-regulation and in their need for learning. In the current study, Story, Hart, Stasson, and Mahoney (2009) examined 340 college students in order to look into these two issues. They found that IAM scores were positively related with scores on the Need for Cognition scale. Thus, greater levels of intrinsic motivation were associated with a higher need for cognition.

It seems that employees who are  intrinsically motivated may be more interested in mastering skills and learning new material than in simply meeting a goal or competing with coworkers. On the other hand, EAM was not significantly related to need for cognition. The authors believe that rather than being motivated by learning, extrinsically motivated employees may be motivated by competition and external rewards.

The authors also found that IAM was positively related to frequency of self-regulation, showing that those with higher levels of intrinsic motivation reported higher levels of self-regulation. However, there was no significant correlation between EAM and frequency of self regulation.  Extrinsically motivated employees may need a greater push from management (e.g., rewards, deadlines, regulation) in order to successfully reach their goals.

The take-away here is that depending on the type of motivation an employee has, and the kinds of organizational policies and practices in place, an employee may find it more or less difficult to work towards achieving their goals. Intrinsically motivated employees will naturally be compelled to learn and master organizational skills and tasks. They will probably not be motivated by deadlines or external rewards. On the other hand, extrinsically motivated employees are more likely to succeed in competitive environments in which they have deadlines and are closely regulated by supervisors. Intrinsically motivated employees however, may be more successful in environments where they can independently regulate their goal-attainment strategies.

Story, P.A., Hart, J.W., Stasson, M.F., & Mahoney, J.M. (2009). Using a two-factor theory of achievement motivation to examine performance-based outcomes and self-regulatory processes. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 391-395.

Key to Good Boss-Employee Relationships: First Impressions and Then Performance

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Topic: Leadership, Personality, Performance
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (MAR 2009)
Article: The development of leader–member exchanges: Exploring how personality and performance influence leader and member relationships over time.
Authors: Nahrgang, J.D., Morgeson, F.P., and Ilies, R.
Reviewed By: Samantha Paustian-Underdahl

The relationships that form between leaders and their employees have been associated with a number of workplace outcomes including employee satisfaction, performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. However, little research has examined how these leader-member relationships develop over time. Nahrgang, Morgeson, and Ilies (2009) followed 330 leader-member dyads over an eight-week period of time to see how personality and performance impacts the quality of these relationships.

The authors found that within each two-person team, there were different levels of leader member  relationship quality. In other words, some relationships between a leader and members were stronger than others. However, in general all relationship quality increased over time and then stabilized. The authors also found that leaders based their first impressions of each leader-member relationship on how extraverted each team member appeared to be. The members however based their first impressions of the relationship quality on how agreeable their leader seemed.

These perceptions changed after the leaders and members became more familiar with one another, however. Actual behavior, rather than personality became more important for relationship quality as the leaders and members interacted over time. For both leaders and members, the performance of their dyadic partner was a key predictor of relationship quality.

The take away message for this article is that first impressions are important in determining higher and lower-quality leader-member relationships. This suggests that leaders and members should take this into account when they first interact, as initial interactions are important to the assessment of relationship quality. This research also shows that once the initial impressions of relationship quality are formed, the performance of each dyad partner becomes important in determining the relationship quality in the early stages (first eight weeks).

Higher-quality leader-member relationships have been shown to be determinants of socialization, employee well-being, and turnover reduction. Thus it is important to consider how employees can manage their relationships with members and leaders. For example, members may be able to manage their career by engaging in more extraverted behaviors (e.g., being sociable and talkative) and by focusing on enhancing their performance. Leaders can manage their career by engaging in more agreeable behaviors (e.g., being trusting and cooperative), as well as by working to enhance their performance.

Nahrgang, J.D., Morgeson, F.P., and Ilies, R. (2009). The development of leader
member exchanges: Exploring how personality and performance influence leader and
member relationships over time. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
108 (256-266).