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The interactive effects of conscientiousness, openness to experience, and political skill on job performance in complex jobs: The importance of context
Author(s) -
Blickle Gerhard,
Meurs James A.,
Wihler Andreas,
Ewen Christian,
Plies Andrea,
Günther Susann
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.1843
Subject(s) - conscientiousness , psychology , openness to experience , job performance , social psychology , moderation , task (project management) , supervisor , context (archaeology) , contextual performance , personality , big five personality traits , job attitude , job design , construct (python library) , applied psychology , job satisfaction , management , extraversion and introversion , computer science , paleontology , biology , economics , programming language
Summary Caveats concerning the ability of personality to predict job performance have been raised because of seemingly modest criterion‐related validity. The goal of the present research was to test whether narrowing the context via the type of job (i.e., jobs with complex task demands) and adding a social skill‐related moderator (i.e., political skill) would improve performance prediction. Further, along with political skill, the broad factor of personality demonstrated in prior research to have the strongest criterion validity (i.e., conscientiousness) was joined with a narrow construct closely related to openness to experience (i.e., learning approach) in a three‐way interactive prediction of supervisor‐rated task performance. With the employee–supervisor dyads among professionals , but not with the control group of non‐professional employees, task performance was predicted by the three‐way interaction, such that those high on all three received the highest performance ratings. Implications, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.