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Conscientiousness and managerial performance
Author(s) -
Robertson Ivan T.,
Baron Helen,
Gibbons Patrick,
Maciver Rab,
Nyfield Gill
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of occupational and organizational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.257
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 2044-8325
pISSN - 0963-1798
DOI - 10.1348/096317900166967
Subject(s) - conscientiousness , psychology , job performance , personality , social psychology , construct (python library) , big five personality traits , hierarchical structure of the big five , applied psychology , job satisfaction , big five personality traits and culture , computer science , extraversion and introversion , programming language
Recent research has provided clear evidence that personality factors are associated with job performance. The construct of conscientiousness has been shown to be a particularly promising predictor of overall job performance. Some authors have proposed that conscientiousness might be the ‘g’ of personality and predict performance in most occupational areas. The nature of the construct of conscientiousness is reviewed and consideration given to the likely behaviour associated with high conscientiousness. It is hypothesized that, given the requirements of managerial work, the criterion‐related validity of conscientiousness may not extend to all managerial jobs. Conscientiousness scores are derived for a sample of managers ( N = 437), with the aid of personality questionnaire data. In a concurrent validity design these scores are correlated with indicators of current job performance, promotability and specific job performance factors. The correlation of conscientiousness with current performance is close to zero and the correlation with promotability is ‐.20. The pattern of relationships between conscientiousness and the job performance factors is used to interpret the finding that conscientiousness is not influential in determining managerial performance. The results suggest that there may be limits to the range of occupational areas in which conscientiousness is closely linked with job performance.