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Looking for performance in personality inventories: The primacy of evaluative information over descriptive traits
Author(s) -
Caruana Sylvain,
Lefeuvre Régis,
Mollaret Patrick
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/ejsp.2034
Subject(s) - psychology , personality , social psychology , big five personality traits , value (mathematics) , relevance (law) , personality assessment inventory , alternative five model of personality , big five personality traits and culture , statistics , mathematics , political science , law
Abstract Three experiments were designed to demonstrate that job performance inferences from personality inventories rely more on the agentic or communal value conveyed by the items compared with the Big‐Five traits they are supposed to describe. In the first two experiments, the participants had to predict the job performances of fictitious job applicants based on their responses to a personality inventory. In Experiment 1, the information on personality was held constant, such that the applicants' responses varied solely on their agentic, communal, or purely descriptive orientation. In Experiment 2, the social value of the responses again varied as well as the information about the applicants' personality (agreeable vs. conscientious). The results showed that the agentic profiles were the most predictive of the performance, regardless of the personality factors. In Experiment 3, we reversed the procedure. The participants filled out a personality inventory in the place of a more or less successful employee. The results here showed that the information about the performance had the greatest impact on the agentic items, independent of the personality factors measured. These results confirm the relevance of social judgment models in personality research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.