Handbook of Personality at Work

Neil Christiansen, Robert Tett, Neil Christiansen, Robert Tett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134055869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Personality has emerged as a key factor when trying to understand why people think, feel, and behave the way they do at work. Recent research has linked personality to important aspects of work such as job performance, employee attitudes, leadership, teamwork, stress, and turnover. This handbook brings together into a single volume the diverse areas of work psychology where personality constructs have been applied and investigated, providing expert review and analysis based on the latest advances in the field.

1

The Long and Winding Road

An Introduction to the Handbook of Personality at Work

Neil D. Christiansen and Robert P. Tett

No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers.

Robert Heinlein

Personality surrounds us at work. Of course, personality is inherently psychological and therefore cannot be directly observed, but the effects are everywhere. A morning training session goes smoothly, but in the afternoon, the negative disposition of one individual sours the experience for the trainer and trainees alike. A manager tries to decide whether the self-esteem of her struggling direct report would be able to handle more forceful encouragement or if a pep talk would be a better tactic. A service representative gets encouraged by coworkers to apply for an open position in management because they believe he would be a “natural leader.” Laypeople and applied psychologists now agree that personality plays an important role in understanding work behavior, and there is a shared awareness that people differ—sometimes greatly—in how they respond to situations encountered in the workplace.

Agreement on the importance of personality constructs at work is a relatively recent development, and research progress has been anything but smooth over the years. Schneider (2007) reviewed the evolution of the study of personality at work and noted extended periods of skepticism preceding this consensus. Issues related to measurement, research design, and the lack of an organizing framework for traits obscured cumulative inferences about the importance of personality in the workplace (Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Moreover, personality psychology as a field of inquiry was troubled at times (e.g., Adelson, 1969; Carlson, 1971), adding challenges to the effort to apply personality research to the psychology of work. Despite these setbacks, the industry of personality assessment continued to thrive over the decades, and this was no less true in organizations where assessment results were commonly used to help identify desirable job applicants and develop existing employees (Hale, 1982).

The disconnect between what research scientists alleged about the inutility of personality constructs in work settings and what laypeople, consultants, and business leaders believed persisted until the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this period, events converged to convince the last bastion of skeptics to abandon their nihilistic position. Primary research studies using improved personality tests and better criterion measures were published and demonstrated trait scores could predict work behavior (e.g., Day & Silverman, 1989; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp, & McCloy, 1990). At the same time, meta-analytic methods of aggregating research results had matured, permitting quantitative reviews of the literature to confirm that personality tests can be used to predict valued outcomes. For example, personality traits showed substantive relationships with leadership emergence (Lord, De Vader, & Alliger, 1986) and job performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Tett et al., 1991). In the decade following this watershed period, the psychological research community more generally found this evidence compelling (Hogan & Roberts, 2001; Hough, 2001).

By the mid-1990s, the landscape had been transformed from what it was just a few years earlier. There was an explosion in the number of studies published using personality constructs to explain different aspects of work attitudes, work behavior, and job performance. Research investigated advantages of expanding the criterion domain of job performance when using personality traits as predictors to include citizenship (Organ & Ryan, 1995) and counterproductive work behavior (Collins & Schmidt, 1993). Disagreements emerged as to the relative merits of measuring broad versus narrow trait constructs (Ones & Viswesvaran, 1996; Paunonen, Rothstein, & Jackson, 1999) and whether applicant faking was a serious problem (Christiansen, Goffin, Johnston, & Rothstein, 1994; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996). Some studies examined personality variables as moderators of relationships, such as between stressors and strains (Moyle, 1995); others posited various mediators of relationships between personality and work outcomes (e.g., Fritzsche, McIntire, & Yost, 2002; Judge, Bono, & Locke, 2000). With a straightened road toward scientific progress, personality and work emerged as a vigorous research area that continues to run its course with no end in sight. From here on out, it would appear to be full speed ahead.

The purpose of this handbook is to bring together into a single volume the diverse areas of work psychology where personality constructs have been applied and investigated. Over the past two decades alone, an enormous amount of research has been done across these areas, and it would be a daunting task for anyone to stay abreast of all of it in the primary literature. The chapters herein provide expert review and analysis of the key topics relating to personality in work settings, offering clear foundations for programmatic research, theory development, and evidence-based guidance to practitioners. Before offering an outline of this handbook’s structure, we introduce a general discussion of what personality is and our reasons for compiling this book.

What Is Personality?

Although there are many definitions of personality, there are some common features. Funder (2010) identifies those commonalities by defining personality as the individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms behind those patterns. There are two other important concepts often associated with personality. First, personality is thought to drive and direct behavior. As a cause of people’s actions, it is intrinsically motivational in nature. Second, it is involved in determining how people react to situations. The idea that personality is involved in differences in adaptation to the environment was an important aspect of the earliest theories of personality psychologists, including Kurt Lewin (1952), Gordon Allport (1937), and Henry Murray (1939). Thus, the impact of personality on behavior has always been construed to be an interaction between the person and the situation.

The study of personality therefore involves attempts to explain and predict behavior by trying to determine “why” people do things in context. For many, this makes it the core of psychological inquiry. Hall and Lindzey (1957), in characterizing the perspective of Henry Murray, said, “Personality is the essence of a human being” (p. 9). In Explorations in Personality, Murray (1939) had argued that all psychology was really the study of personality; it is just some approaches settle for taking different kinds of snapshots in time and location rather than viewing the whole. It is beyond a doubt that personality psychology is what the average person thinks of first when asked what a psychologist is most likely to study (McAdams, 1997).

Why Study Personality at Work?

By this point in the introduction, the answer to this question may be obvious to the reader. One way to appreciate the question is to try to envision a field that attempted to develop explanations and interventions with regard to what people do at work without the idea of personality. Individual differences in ability and experience would still come into play but very little could be said of interests, preferences, or temperament. Motivation might be discussed in terms of general principles (e.g., goal setting) that apply to all of us, but dealing with individual differences in motivation would quickly prove restrictive and incomplete without taking account of constructs closely related to personality, such as self-concept, needs, and reward preferences. Without personality, a host of questions would defy satisfactory resolution. Why do people who tend to be late showing up for work also have a propensity to be absent more often? Why are some workers excited by learning new software that could make their work easier but others are apprehensive? Why is it that the individuals who are dissatisfied at their present jobs are also likely to have been dissatisfied with their previous jobs? Questions such as these are grist for the mill of efforts to explain people in the workplace, and answers to such questions can be found in this volume.

Although integral to understanding why employees think, feel, and act as they do at work, applying personality theory and research in this context involves a host of challenges due to the complexity of how personality functions. Personality cannot be understood to develop, find expression, or be measured without consideration of many difficult issues that may operate at multiple levels. Here are a few sources of complexity demanding attention when dealing with personality.

Personality Is Multidimensional

Discovery of the Five-Factor Model (FFM; e.g., Tupes & Christal, 1961) has contributed greatly to the advance of personality psychology from a trait perspective, perhaps no more so than in work settings. Although offering a valuable organizing framework for dealing with diverse traits, the FFM falls toward the tip of the taxonomic iceberg of personality trait content. Beneath the surface of this highly popular Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (OCEAN) model lie layers of more specific traits that, although interrelated within broader clusters, are not interchangeable. Assertive workers, for example, tend to be sociable and sensation seeking. Sometimes assertiveness is the critical factor needed to explain job success and the other narrow traits (if relevant at all) are secondary; in other circumstances, the reverse might hold true. Complicating this, important personality constructs such as locus of control have been shown to lie outside the FFM entirely, but these traits can explain important work behavior beyond those dimensions (Hattrup, O’Connell, & Labrador, 2005). The multidimensionality of personality is an important complexity to be reckoned with when using personality variables in research and practice.

Trait-by-Trait Interactions

Personality in work settings is most often studied in terms of single traits as predictors of a given criterion. If multiple traits are considered, their contributions are almost always identified as additive and compensatory. Such single-trait applications are important, but personality affords the possibility of additional depth due to trait-by-trait interactions. If you ask people, for example, whether it is okay to have a boss who is dominant (i.e., is comfortable telling others what to do), most will say “yes.” But many quickly change their answer if you add that the dominant boss also tends to be argumentative (versus supportive), volatile (versus emotionally stable), or unyielding (versus open-minded). Thus, whether dominance has a positive or negative effect on leadership may depend on the leader’s standing on other traits. Multiplicative trait interactions, and configural profiles more broadly, can be critical in determining personality-based fit to a given situation. Long valued by those involved in clinical personality assessment, researchers have only recently begun to explore these complexities in the psychology of work (e.g., Witt, 2002; Witt, Burke, Barrick, & Mount, 2002).

Personality Measurement Is Challenging

We draw inferences about personality by what we see people do and by what they say about themselves. Personality assessment, whether by direct observation or self-report, is in itself very complex and invites error and uncertainty. Some traits are easier to see, some are more likely to evoke exaggerated self-descriptions, some people are better observers, some methods yield better validity, and so on. Entire literatures are devoted to person perception, response biases, and measurement methods intended to improve the validity of personality-based inferences. Personality research and its applications depend critically on measurement, and so part of the complexity in dealing with personality in general comes from dealing with complexities in its measurement.

Personality as an Explanatory Construct

At the simplest level, personality traits are brief and convenient descriptions of an individual’s behavioral tendencies. When we say someone is extraverted, for example, we are suggesting that we have seen that person behaving in an outgoing manner, positively engaging others, possibly with dominant tendencies, and gladly accepting (if not seeking) to be the center of attention. We are not only describing what we have seen that person do in the past, we are also projecting what we expect him or her to do in future, at least under similar conditions. The descriptive economy of personality traits is sufficient to warrant central focus on traits in the psychology of individual differences. But traits also have close motivational ties to needs, values, goals, interests, self-concept, and related constructs. The way that traits relate to motivation, whether as need satisfaction or in relation to other variables such as interests or preferences, invites consideration of the psychological processes beyond a merely descriptive function. For the researcher interested in the psychology of work, personality offers a challenging and engaging target of investigation. To the practitioner in this area, it demands careful theoretical consideration for the full predictive potential of personality to be realized.

Personality and Situations

As noted above, situations are key in any consideration of personality, serving many roles. First, they shape the way genes serving personality are expressed. Second, they affect personality development, especially in the early years of life, in tandem with experience. Third, they are the primary source of stimuli bringing certain traits into action and not others. This is critical in work settings where we seek to identify the specific traits that underlie behavior, performance, and satisfaction in particular jobs, groups, and organizations. Fourth, they provide the context in which behavior is interpreted as trait expression. Providing detailed instructions can be helpful to novices but overbearing to the highly skilled. Situations also assist with inferences about which trait has been expressed by similar behaviors with different psychological meaning; in one context interrupting someone may involve the trait of rudeness, but in another, it could be a manifestation of impulsivity. Fifth, personality can lead individuals to seek out or even create situations where a need is fulfilled or certain behavioral tendencies are valued and rewarded. One cannot speak meaningfully about personality and behavior without invoking situations in one or more ways, and considering all the connections between traits and situations is a challenging undertaking.

Situations Are Highly Differentiated

Few terms in psychology are as broad, encompassing, and potentially confusing as “situation.” Countless concepts fall within this general class of variables. Consider the following: task demands, job type, reward contingency, coworker attributes, group norms, team size, leadership style, organizational culture, and economic climate. Each of these terms captures taxonomies of more specific situational factors potentially relevant to the expression and evaluation of personality. The sheer number of such “situational” variables is humbling and the possibilities for interactions among them in their effects on personality processes can be daunting.

The Value of a Trait Depends on Context

Individual traits tend to have a default value as positive or negative. Averaging across situations, people typically prefer that those around them fall at one pole of a trait rather than the other pole. However, certain situations can accentuate, attenuate, or even override a trait’s default value. We may generally favor being around extraverts who tend to be engaging and display positive emotions, but there are times when we seek more quiet, reserved, and contemplative company because extraverts may be distracting when deadlines encroach. Along the same vein, many tasks are performed better by workers who are dependable, meticulous, and rule oriented. However, some tasks demand flexibility and creativity. In these instances, timeliness, attention to detail, and rule following are sacrificed when success dema...