*(Not as much as you might think!).
As I mentioned in my blog introducing this topic last month, after fading from prominence in the late 1960’s, (personality) trait theory has enjoyed a resurgence of interest since the 1990’s, after Costa & McCrae produced consistent evidence of the existence of five major personality factors: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability (also known as ‘Neuroticism’), commonly known as the ‘Big Five’. This has become a widely accepted template for describing and understanding the structure of human personality, but how much impact does it really have on work performance?
While it’s accepted that personality has an impact on performance at work, the impact is probably not as large as commonly believed, with recent meta-analytic research suggesting that effect sizes are merely ‘small’ for 4 of the 5 factors, and (barely) ‘medium’ for Conscientiousness.
So what did that research discover? In 2022, Zell and Lesick published an important quantitative synthesis of over 50 meta-analyses on the relationship between the Big Five and work performance. More than 30 of these were in the domain of job performance alone. Their synthesis represents one of the most comprehensive analyses in the literature to date of the connection between personality and performance, integrating disparate findings from many years’ research, and filling a major gap in the personality literature.
After aggregating across the full set of 54 meta-analyses, they observed correlations (associations) for each of the Big Five traits with performance as set out below:
· Extraversion(0.10)
· Agreeableness(0.10)
· Neuroticism(−0.12) and
· Openness(0.13)
All showed small associations with performance that were comparable in size and in the predicted direction (i.e. negative for Neuroticism and positive for the others). However, the association of Conscientiousness with performance was medium in size (0.19).
They interpreted the overall effects using the recommended guidelines for ‘Individual Differences’ research which are different from those used most often in psychological research (Cohen’s d) where: 0.05 = very small, 0.10 = small, 0.20 = medium, 0.30 = large, 0.40 = very large (Funder& Ozer, 2019; Gignac & Szordorai, 2016).
These results suggest that, when viewed independently, each Big Five trait has a meaningful relationship with performance, but Conscientiousness is the most ‘robust’ (i.e. referring to the reliability and stability of research findings or conclusions against variations in methods, data, or conditions).
Focusing just on the meta-analyses they obtained relating broadly to job performance, as in the primary model, overall effect sizes for each Big Five trait were broadly similar with mainly small effects on job performance for: Extraversion (0.14), Agreeableness (0.11), Neuroticism(−0.15), and Openness (0.11) with Conscientiousness once more having the largest (medium) effect (0.20).
Key Takeaways:
The very large number of primary studies analysed in Zell and Lesick on the association of Big Five traits with performance make it possible for us to draw definitive conclusions that are rare in the behavioural sciences.
You may be wondering - if personality only has a small effect on work performance, what other factors impact performance at work? I’ll be covering this later in the series.
Join me next time to find out more as I explore:
