In recent decades, the corporate realm has witnessed a growing embrace of the Five Factor Approach, even as various alternative personality models exist. The Big Five personality test can be taken for free by using the Psyculator website https://psyculator.com/big-five-personality-test/ . This groundbreaking theory posits that human personality can be distilled into five core factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, sometimes referred to as Emotional Stability (Block, 1995, 2001; John & Srivastava, 1999). These overarching factors are intricately connected to specific personality traits called personality facets. The widely recognized Five Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), also known as the Big Five, encompasses 30 lower-level personality facets, each with six facets aligning with the broad factors. For instance, Neuroticism is linked to attributes such as anxiety and anger, Conscientiousness evaluates qualities like self-discipline and planning abilities, Agreeableness embodies traits like altruism and empathy, Extraversion gauges sociability and extroversion, while Openness generally assesses one’s inclination toward embracing new experiences.
Substantial research has affirmed that personality can effectively predict job performance. Take Conscientiousness, frequently considered the most robust predictor of job performance across diverse professions. It consistently demonstrates predictive correlations in numerous meta-analyses: .18 (Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991); .22 (Barrick & Mount, 1991); .24 (Hurtz & Donovan, 2000); .26 (Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, & Crawford, 2013). To put it simply, Conscientiousness accounts for up to 6.8 percent of the variance in job performance. While this might seem modest, it’s vital to recognize that after IQ, acknowledged as the most potent predictor of job performance, the Big Five personality factors emerge as the second most influential predictors for job outcomes. Importantly, personality augments the predictive value beyond IQ, suggesting that some job performance attributed to personality cannot be solely attributed to employees’ intellectual capabilities.
What’s even more intriguing is the extensive body of research indicating that personality provides insights into various critical organizational metrics beyond job performance. Numerous meta-analyses have validated the pivotal role of personality in predicting job satisfaction (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), burnout (Alarcon, Eschleman, & Bowling, 2009), absenteeism (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 2003; Salgado, 2002), presenteeism (Johns, 2010; Miraglia, & Johns, 2016), workplace accidents (Clarke & Robertson, 2005; Clarke & Robertson, 2008), organizational commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), organizational justice (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001), and counterproductive workplace behavior (Grijalva & Newman, 2015).
Furthermore, other meta-analytic studies underscore the significance of personality assessments in predicting both positive and negative leadership styles (Bono & Judge, 2004; Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Van Engen, 2003). Regarding the latter, personality assessments serve as valuable tools for identifying detrimental leaders whose actions harm organizations. Importantly, a growing body of organizational research has linked destructive leadership to workplace bullying (e.g., Boddy, 2005, 2010, 2015), with a recent study suggesting that in a sample of working individuals in the United States, psychopathic and narcissistic leadership styles explained as much as 41 percent and 25 percent of the variance in workplace bullying, and up to 20 percent of the variance in employee depression (Tokarev, Phillips, Hughes, & Irwing, 2017). This has substantial economic consequences, with the organizational costs of workplace bullying in the UK alone estimated to range from four to four and a half billion pounds annually, attributed to lost productivity and legal expenses (Rayner, 1997; Sheehan, 1999). In fact, the issue of workplace bullying is so persistent that Einarsen (1999) asserted that “Bullying at work… is a more debilitating and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stressors combined” (p.2).
