THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS AS PREDICTORS OF JOB PERFORMANCE
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Date
2012
Authors
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Publisher
ACHARYA N.G. RANGA AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY
Abstract
Personality has been considered as an important factor, specifically for predicting the
job performance. Personality is a behaviour which differentiates one person from another
and provides insight whether a person will do some specific job in comparison to others.
Moreover, the traits relevant to personality are considered to be stable and steady throughout
the work life in a big five personality model.
Experts in the field of personality are of the view that the individuals in fact have a
stable and long term traits that affects behaviours at work. With reference to research on
personality, some scholars captured that personality is the effective tool that predicts job
performance. The technique is mostly adopted at the time of personnel selection procedure
(Barrick and Mount 2002).
Personality is meaningful to management, because employees' personalities may
dictate how well they perform in their jobs. Personality may indicate how hard a person
will work, how organized they are, how well they will interact with others and how
creative they are. The Big Five personality test gives more insight into how one react in
different situations, which can help to choose an occupation. Career professionals and
psychologists use this information in a personality career test for recruitment and candidate
assessment.
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The relationship between personality and job performance has been a frequently
studied topic in industrial psychology in the past century (Barrick, Mount and Judge,
2002). Job performance is a multi-dimensional construct which indicates how well
employees perform their tasks, the initiative they take and the resourcefulness they show in
solving problems.
Job performance could be affected by situational factors, such as the characteristics of
the job, the organisation and co-workers and by dispositional factors (Strumpfer et.al
1998). Dispositional variables can be described as personality characteristics, needs,
attitudes, preferences and motives that result in a tendency to react to situations in a
predetermined manner (House, Shane & Herrold, 1996). Job performance is influenced by
aptitude, need for achievement, self-regard, locus of control, affective temperament and the
interaction between these constructs.
Exploratory research design was adopted for the present study. Twin cities of
Hyderabad and Secunderabad were purposively selected for conducting the study. The
sample of the study was 150 working adults. The only criteria for sample selection was that
adults (men and women) working as teachers, engineers and IT professionals. The data was
collected by using the Big five personality test available on www.outofservice.com/bigfive/
(web site) and Job performance questionnaire was modified version of Extended Satisfaction
with Life Scale by Bernald Gorman (1996). The collected data was scored, tabulated,
analyzed and interpreted with appropriate statistical procedures.
Results indicate that there was a significant correlation at 0.01 level between
personality dimension and job performance and same level of significance found between
income and job performance also. Among all the four independent variables, age of the
respondents had no significance with the job performance because most of the respondents
belonged to young adulthood, so their job performance may not be influenced by age.
Sometimes education also might predict the job performance of the working adults.
Engineers and IT professionals exhibited high satisfaction with job performance
compared to teachers. The reasons could be good relation with their colleagues, good
working atmosphere and appropriate facilities available in the work place for engineers and
IT professionals.
Among three occupations, engineers with extraversion were highly satisfied with
their job performance compared to teachers and IT professionals. The reasons could be
extraversion personality trait includes characteristics of sociability, outgoing, talkative,
assertiveness and good planning, thus might have led to high job performance. Majority of
teachers with neuroticism personality dimension were not satisfied with their job
performance. The reasons could be typical characteristics of neuroticism such as anxiety,
low concentration level and disorganization.
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Keywords
PERSONALITY, DIMENSIONS, AS PREDICTORS, JOB, PERFORMANCE