PERSONALITY JOB PERFORMANCE

How Personality can Impact on Job Performance

How Personality can Impact on Job Performance

Introduction

For this paper, the second topic regarding the impact of personality on job performance was selected. A leading personality psychologist has noted that a scientific taxonomy assists researchers in organizing and integrating research results by offering a standard scientific nomenclature. This is exactly what the Big Five model has helped to accomplish.

The Big Five Personality Traits and Job Performance

The purpose of a model such as the Big Five is not to reduce the complexity of individuals to just five easily manageable traits (Barrick, 2008).

Rather, the Big Five personality dimensions have provided a framework in which to organize and describe personality characteristics in order to further our knowledge via scientific research (Barrick, 2008). They are the building blocks in the hierarchical structure of personality. Furthermore, they can be used to conceptualize and describe personality traits in a hypothetical multidimensional space and thus further our understanding of human behavior.

The Big Five dimensions of personality have been useful in providing a framework for organizing personality attributes used in industrial, work, and organizational psychology research and practice. They have been investigated in relation to many areas of interest, including occupational attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. For example, studies have linked characteristics from the Big Five framework to occupational interests, finding employment, career success, job performance, and job satisfaction. The first part of this entry presents a brief history of the Big Five dimensions of personality (Barrick, 2008).

Evidence supporting the validity of the Big Five factors of personality is compelling. The Big Five have facilitated communication of results among work psychologists who use personality variables in their research and organizational practice. The Big Five taxonomy has been instrumental in allowing for the cumulation of empirical findings across individual studies and has thus ...