An independent study examined how the Big Five personality dimensions—Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—relate to three job performance criteria: job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data, across five occupational groups: professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled employees.
The Relationship Between Personality and Job Performance
Results indicated that one dimension of personality, Conscientiousness, showed a consistent relationship with all job performance criteria for all occupational groups. For the remaining personality dimensions, the estimated true score correlations varied by occupational group and criterion type. Extraversion was a valid predictor for two occupations involving social interaction, managers and sales across criterion types. Also, both Openness to Experience and Extraversion were valid predictors of the training proficiency criterion across occupations. Other personnel selection and training Dimensions were also found to be valid predictors for some occupations and some criterion types, but the magnitude of the estimated true score correlations was small (p < .10).
Implications of the Big Five Personality Model
Overall, the results illustrate the benefits of using the “Big Five” model of personnel selection to accumulate and communicate empirical findings. The findings have numerous implications for research and practice in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, training and development, and performance appraisal. This study investigated the relationship between the “Big Five” performance predictors (Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) and three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data) for five occupational groups (professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled).
For information on RightPeople’s personality assessment in the workplace Questionnaire called the OCEAN Occupational Personality Assessment, please click here.
