Personality Traits Predict Performance Differently Across Different Jobs

upstart writes:

Personality Traits Predict Performance Differently Across Different Jobs:

"Although past studies made statements about the effects of personality traits on job performance in general, the specifics of these relationships really depend on the job," said Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. "More interesting findings exist when we take a deeper look at performance within the different jobs."

Wilmot and Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, combined multiple meta-analyses of the five big personality traits - conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and neuroticism - and examined their effect on job performance. Meta-analysis is a process used to systematically merge multiple independent findings using statistical methods to calculate an overall effect.

The researchers indexed these personality trait relationships across nine major occupational groups - clerical, customer service, healthcare, law enforcement, management, military, professional, sales, and skilled/semiskilled. They accounted for job complexity and what occupational experts rate as the relevance of these personality traits to job requirements.

Overall, Wilmot and Ones found that relationships between personality traits and performance varied greatly across the nine major occupational groups. The main source of these differences pertained to occupational complexity.

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