Despite the existence of numerous personality models, the Five Factor Approach has gained significant traction and recognition since the mid-1980s. You can access a free Big 5 personality test on the Psyculator platform https://psyculator.com/. In essence, the Five Factor Approach posits that human personality can be categorized into only five broad factors, commonly labelled as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, which is also referred to as Emotional Stability (Block, 1995, 2001; John & Srivastava, 1999). These broad factors are linked to more specific personality traits, often referred to as personality facets. The most widely adopted framework is the Five Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), commonly known as the Big Five, which comprises 30 lower-level personality facets (i.e., six facets per broad factor). For instance, Neuroticism is connected with traits such as anxiety and anger; Conscientiousness evaluates self-discipline and planning abilities; Agreeableness encompasses characteristics like altruism and empathy; Extraversion is used to measure sociability and outgoingness, while Openness generally assesses one’s receptivity to new experiences.
A substantial body of research has demonstrated that personality can predict job performance. For example, Conscientiousness, which is the most robust predictor of job performance across a wide range of occupations, has shown consistent predictive associations across several 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 explains up to 6.8 percent of the variability in job performance. While this may seem relatively modest, it’s worth noting that after IQ (recognized as the most potent predictor of job performance), the Big Five personality factors come second in terms of predictive power for job outcomes. Importantly, personality contributes additional predictive value beyond IQ, indicating that a portion of job performance attributable to personality cannot be solely attributed to employees’ intellectual capabilities.
What is even more fascinating is the extensive body of research revealing that personality can explain various critical organizational metrics beyond job performance. For instance, numerous meta-analyses have confirmed that personality plays a pivotal role 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).
Additionally, 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). Concerning the latter, personality assessments serve as valuable psychometric tools for identifying destructive leaders whose actions have adverse effects on organizations (e.g., Babiak & Hare, 2006; Campbell, Hoffman, Campbell, & Marchisio, 2011; Mathieu, Hare, Jones, Babiak, & Neumann, 2013). Notably, a growing body of organizational research has linked destructive leadership to workplace bullying (e.g., Boddy, 2005, 2010, 2015), with a recent study revealing that in a sample of working individuals in the United States, psychopathic and narcissistic leadership styles accounted for 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 carries substantial economic costs, as in the UK alone, the organizational costs of workplace bullying were 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).”
