Personality Matters - Barrick & Mount - Article

In contrast to what researchers in the past have said, personality matters because it predicts how we behave at work and the Big Five traits are predictors or job performance across a wide variety of outcomes that organizations value. Personality characteristics are always taken into consideration, even unnoticed. By selection, a manager would always prefer a dependable, confident and persistent person over a lazy and impulsive person.
But also research has shown the importance of personality. Personality is important as an enduring predictor of behaviors at work, which cannot be predicted by general mental ability, job knowledge of the situation itself. Often, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are the best predictors for job performance. In this article, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness to Experience are used as predictors of performance, but only effective in specific niches:

• Extraversion: only significant when a job involves interacting with others and focused on influencing, status and power.

• Agreeableness: only matters when interaction involves helping, cooperating and nurturing others.

• Openness to experience: is only significant when creativity is needed and when influencing the ability to adapt to change.

Human behavior at work is complex, and therefore the relationship between personality traits and job performance is difficult to understand. The article gives three future areas for research. The first area the investigation of the interaction between personality and context. Barrick and Mount state that personality has the biggest effect on behavior when the situation is relevant to the trait’s expression, but weak enough to give employees the opportunity to choose how they behave in a particular situation. The second area is investigating the motivation a person has, which influences job performance. Motivational variables could be used as mediators by the relationship between personality traits and specific performance dimensions. The last area includes finding critical measurement issues to measure personality and its influence.