The Big Five Personality Traits Model is the framework that gained a
wide consensus in personality research. Its early versions were developed
in early 1960s, but it took about 30 years for it to become main-stream and the
most commonly accepted model of personality traits.
The model identified five major personality traits: (1)
Openness, (2) Conscientiousness, (3) Extraversion, (4) Agreeableness and (5)
Neuroticism. Each and every person has all these five personality traits
and scores differently on each of them. In other words, the Big Five is not a
categorical (taxonomy) model saying that some people are in “this” category,
while others are in “that” category.
The Big Five was developed as a
result of numerous attempts to create a
comprehensive framework that captures most aspects of human personality.
This means that the Big Five is broad and descriptive. It has some predictive
value, but usually lower level (more specific) personality traits have a better
predictive power.
In my view, for many areas of
practice such as Human Resources management, the Big Five is “a good enough” predictor
of behavior. At the same time, for other areas such as marketing, the Big Five
would give inferior results as compared with more specific traits such as
“price sensitiveness”.
Apart from covering a large area
of human personality and being a comprehensive model, the Big Five Personality traits are overall stable throughout life.
Indeed, there are some changes, but these are of low magnitude. For example,
the “levels of Agreeableness and
Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion,
Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease” (source) over long periods of
time.
Not only are the Big Five personality traits relatively stable throughout live,
they are also heritable to a large degree. The heritability of the five
personality traits rage from 57% for Openness to 42% for Agreeableness (source)
Next, each of the five personality traits will be described:
Openness
to experience
As the
name says, openness to experience reflects a
general tendency of curiosity and a general positive attitude towards the “new”,
the “unconventional” and variety. Openness
includes the ability to “Think out of
the box”, or in other words, openness incorporates creativity, lack of conformity and the dispositions to be imaginative
and broad-minded.
People who
score high on openness to experience usually are in need of a high level of autonomy and freedom to
act by their own guidelines.
Another
characteristic of openness to experience that has emerged from research is the
intellectual dimension, in the sense that people who score high on this trait have an inclination towards culture, art
and exhibit intellectual curiosity. In my humble opinion, this should be
taken with a grain of salt. Openness is a general human personality trait and many
people are not even acquainted with art and culture. My suggestion is to view openness to experience as an indicator of intellectual
intrigue or curiosity, but at the same time be aware that this tendency
could be expressed in various ways including ones that have nothing to do with
art and culture.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is comprised out of two dimensions that are to a certain
degree interdependent, namely achievement
and dependability.
Achievement includes
aspects such as being hardworking and perseverant
towards achieving a defined goal.
Dependability includes aspects
such as being highly organized,
making (realistic) plans and acting
in order to fulfill them. In addition it includes being careful, acting in a responsible manner and working thoroughly (not leaving loose
ends). Characteristic for people with a high level of conscientiousness is that
they exhibit a lot of self-discipline.
Extraversion
Similarly to conscientiousness, Extraversion is comprised out of two dimensions that are to a certain
degree related, namely ambition and
sociability.
Ambition includes aspects such as showing initiative,
aiming at high achievements, being impetuous and showing zeal.
Sociability includes aspects such as
being expressive and talkative, being assertive and expressive. It also
includes a general tendency to seek the company of others and being active in a
social group.
People who score high on Extraversion
generally experience positive emotions (have a general positive affect) and
show a lot of energy.
Agreeableness
Agreeableness sums up
traits that make an individual to be
liked by others. It includes elements such as being polite, flexible, trustworthy, caring, cooperative and tolerant.
People who score high on agreeableness
usually do not exhibit behaviors such
as being suborned, suspicious and antagonistic towards other
individuals. They would also be more likely to be compassionate than to hold grudges against someone.
In a nut-shell, agreeableness represents
how good someone is with people or,
in other words, the level of social
skills.
Neuroticism
Neuroticism is also known as “emotional
stability” if the trait is reversed – seen from the opposite perspective.
Neuroticism
represents the tendency to experience general negative affect and specific
negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, anger, insecurity and hostility
towards others.
People
who score high on Neuroticism are easily affected in the emotional area.
They tend to not be very good at
managing their emotions. Moreover, they
tend to interpret most events as being negative, thus making them
vulnerable in face of even the slightest bad events.
People who score high on Neuroticism
tend to feel embarrassed and worry about
virtually everything.
The Big Five as
Predictors of Job Performance
Now, having described the model
and each of its components, I would like to focus on one of its major applications, namely predicting job performance.
One of the most known scientific
works on the validity of the Big Five on predicting job performance is the meta
analysis done by Barrick and Mount published in 1991. Next I will briefly
present the results of this study.
The authors have hypothesized that
conscientiousness and emotional stability (Neuroticism reversed) would be valid
predictors of job performance overall for all types of jobs (regardless of job
content). The rationale of these hypothesizes is that on one hand, conscientiousness
“measures those personal characteristics that are important for accomplishing
work tasks in all jobs”, while on the other hand “Emotional Stability (when
viewed from the negative pole [Neuroticism]) measures those characteristics
that may hinder successful performance.”
The results, however, confirmed
only that conscientiousness is a valid
predictor of overall job performance across all professions. Neuroticism (emotional stability) was found
to not influence job performance in a negative manner. The explanation that
the authors gave for this counterintuitive finding was that apart from extreme
cases of high level neuroticism, the exact level of this personality trait does
not really influence job performance.
With regard to Extraversion and
Agreeableness, the authors hypothesized that they would be valid predictors of
job performance in “those occupations that involve frequent interaction or
cooperation with others”
The results confirmed the
hypothesis for extraversion being
positively correlated with job performance for those occupations that involve social
interaction. However, the results showed that agreeableness was not a predictor of job performance in these occupations (nor in other types of occupations).
With regard to openness to experience,
the authors hypothesized that it would be a valid predictor of “training
proficiency” which is a component of job performance. In other words, openness to experience will predict better
learning “because Openness to Experience appears to assess individuals’
readiness to participate in learning experiences.”
This hypothesis was confirmed in
the sense that openness to experience
did positively correlate with training proficiency. The authors suggest
that “it is possible that Openness to Experience is actually measuring ability
to learn as well as motivation to learn”.
An interesting result emerged,
namely that Extraversion was also a good
predictor of training proficiency. The authors state that this could be due
to the nature of the training programs analyzed in the study, which were mainly
highly interactive “hands-on” trainings. This implies that people who score
high on extraversion learn better than people who score low in interactive training
sessions, while in a less interactive setting there would be no difference.
The Big Five as Predictors
of Leadership
In a later study Judge, Bono,
Ilies, & Gerhardt (2002) have investigated the validity of the Big Five
personality traits in predicting leadership effectiveness.
As you might think, results were
a bit different than the ones for job performance. Here they are in brief:
Extraversion proved to be the best predictor (out of the Big Five) of
leadership effectiveness. The correlation is quite high (taking into
account that the correlations between personality and effectiveness are usually
small) – 0.31. This means that people who score high on Extraversion are the
most likely to be good leaders.
Not surprising, Conscientiousness was also a positive
predictor of good leadership. This can be seen as good performers become
good leaders or that good leaders have to be both good performers and exhibit
the characteristics of Conscientiousness.
Openness to Experience was also a positive predictor of leadership.
This makes a lot of sense since good leaders should be intellectually curious and
ready to try new experiences.
Neuroticism was found to negatively correlate with leadership. In
other words people with a relatively low emotional stability tend to not be
good leaders.
Agreeableness had a weak correlation with leadership suggesting that it
is not a good predictor of leadership.
Putting together the results of the
two studies I mentioned, an interesting conclusion emerges. Agreeableness is uncorrelated with both job
performance and leadership. This is somehow counterintuitive and
potentially dangerous.
First, it is counterintuitive
since it seems like common sense that people who score high on agreeableness would
perform better than people with low levels of agreeableness especially in jobs
which demand social interactions. The data says it is not so.
Second, it is disturbing from the
perspective or recruitment. People who are high on agreeableness make good
impressions at (especially first) interviews. This can lead to the occurrence
of the halo effect which in turn would make one think that the agreeable person
has other positive characteristics.
Since not even agreeableness, is a
predictor of job performance, the danger of the halo effect is even larger. My
advice, ignore the agreeableness
dimension altogether.
Shortcomings of the model
As I mentioned at the beginning of
this post, the Big Five personality
traits model is not perfect. It has several shortcomings and the main ones are:
Firs, the model is mainly descriptive. This means that the Big Five
is very good at describing human personality and it does not go far beyond
that. The Big Five aggregates in a comprehensible
manner most of what is known about personality, but is in many cases inferior to
more specific personality traits in predicting behavior.
Second, the five personality traits are not fully independent one from
another. In other words, there are some correlations between the traits.
From a practical perspective this is not a serious issue, but from a
theoretical one it can present some disadvantages. For example there is a
negative correlation between extraversion and neuroticism.
Third, the Big Five does not cover the entire area of human
personality. As I mentioned earlier, it covers most of what is known, but
at the same time there are things left out. At the same time, in my view, it is unrealistic to expect a (relatively
simple) model to cover absolutely everything in a vast and diverse domain such
as human personality.
In conclusion, the Big Five personality traits model is
the best compromise that could be achieved up to this point in personality
psychology. It is not perfect, but I believe it is good enough to be at the
same time relatively simple,
comprehensive, sufficiently broad and have reasonable predictive power.
Like it? Spice Up Your Business
This post is documented from:
Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M.
K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A
meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44, 1–26.
Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies,
R., & Gerhardt, M. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and
quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765-780.
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