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In addition to providing a unifying personality framework, research on
the Big Five also has found important relationships between these personal-
ity dimensions and job performance.14 A broad spectrum of occupations was
examined: professionals (including engineers, architects, accountants, attor-
neys), police, managers, salespeople, and semiskilled and skilled employees.
Job performance was defined in terms of performance ratings, training profi-
ciency (performance during training programs), and personnel data such as
salary level. The results showed that conscientiousness predicted job perfor-
mance for all occupational groups. "The preponderance of evidence shows
that individuals who are dependable, reliable, careful, thorough, able to plan,
organized, hardworking, persistent, and achievement-oriented tend to have
higher job performance in most if not all occupations."15 In addition, em-
ployees who score more highly in conscientiousness develop higher levels of
job knowledge, probably because highly conscientious people exert greater
levels of effort on their job. The higher levels of job knowledge then con-
tribute to higher levels of job performance. Consistent with these findings,
evidence also finds a relatively strong and consistent relationship between
conscientiousness and organizational citizenship behavior.16 This, however,
seems to be the only personality dimension that predicts OCB.
For the other personality dimensions, predictability depended upon
both the performance criterion and the occupational group. For in-
stance, extraversion predicted performance in managerial and sales posi-
tions. This finding makes sense since these occupations involve high so-
cial interaction. Similarly, openness to experience was found to be
important in predicting training proficiency, which, too, seems logical.
What wasn't so clear was why positive emotional stability wasn't related
to job performance. Intuitively, it would seem that people who are calm
and secure would do better on almost all jobs than people who are anx-
ious and insecure. The researchers suggested that the answer might be
that only people who have fairly high scores on emotional stability re-
tain their jobs. So the range among those people studied, all of whom
were employed, would tend to be quite small.
MAJOR PERSONALITY ATTRIBUTES INFLUENCING OB
In this section, we want to evaluate more carefully specific personality attributes
that have been found to be powerful predictors of behavior in organizations. The
first is related to where a person perceives the locus of control to be in his or her
life. The others are Machiavellianism, self-esteem, self-monitoring, propensity for
risk taking, and Type A personality. In this section, we shall briefly introduce these
attributes and summarize what we know about their ability to explain and predict
employee behavior.
Locus of Control
Some people believe that they are masters of their own fate.
Other people see themselves as pawns of fate, believing that what happens to
them in their lives is due to luck or chance. The first type, those who believe that
they control their destinies, have been labeled internals, whereas the latter, who
see their lives as being controlled by outside forces, have been called externals.17
A person's perception of the source of his or her fate is termed locus of control.
A large amount of research comparing internals with externals has consis-
tently shown that individuals who have high scores in externality are less satis-
fied with their jobs, have higher absenteeism rates, are more alienated from the
work setting, and are less involved on their jobs than are internals.18
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