Personality + Position Can Add Up to Job Performance

New research as reported in the University of Arkansas article titled, “Personality Traits Predict Performance Differently Across Different Jobs,” shows that your personality can affect job performance depending on the job. Deniz S. Ones, PhD, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Hellervik Professor of Industrial Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, alongside Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas and UMN Psychology alum, combined multiple meta-analyses of the Big Five personality traits to examine their effect on job performance. Overall, they found that there was large variability between personality traits and performance across the nine major occupational groups (clerical, customer service, healthcare, law enforcement, management, military, professional, sales, and skilled/semiskilled) that they measured.

Conscientiousness was found to predict performance in all jobs, with the strongest effect in jobs with low to medium levels of cognitive demands. Otherwise, different traits were predictive for different occupations: agreeableness for healthcare; emotional stability for skilled/semiskilled, law enforcement, and military jobs; extraversion for sales and management; and openness for professional jobs. Other findings suggested that jobs with moderate occupational complexity may be ideal for relying on personality to predict job performance.

The full research can be read on ScienceDirect.

Composed by Flora Pollack, communications assistant.