Relationship Between Personality And Job Performance

Discuss about the Relationship Between Personality and Job Performance.

Personality is very critical factors in studies that are related to predicting the employee’s job performance. It is the behaviour that differentiates one employee or person from another one (Beer & Brooks, 2011) . Personality is the distinguishing factor that provides the wisdom or insight regarding specific person being able to perform specific job as compared to others (Sackett et al., 2002) . As defined by Kahn (1990) too engagement is the quality of harnessing the organizational members in best possible manner in their specific work roles. Considering the importance of creating engagement and personality traits for an organization several organizations across the globe have started taking personality traits while hiring their employees (Kahn, 1990). Realising the importance and critical importance of personality traits this essay will find out the relationship that exists between personality and their job performances. This essay will also further explain the manner in which the Organizational Behaviour scholars as well as leaders need to apply the knowledge regarding personality and job performance within their organizations so as to derive maximum benefits from it.

Personality that can be defined as an enduring pattern of behaviours, thoughts as well as emotions that help in characterising any person combined with the psychological process which follows those characteristics (Robbins et al., 2013).  The set of invisible features as well as practices that is present at the rear end of relatively stable pattern of behaviour while responding to the people, ideas, or objects present in an environment is known as personality (Daft, 2008).  The traits that are very much relevant for personality are very much permanent as well as constant all through the work life in the personality behaviour model (Denissen et al., 2011 ; Gerber et al., 2011 ; Myers, 1998) . There are several theories of personality that helps in examining the similarities as well as variances in any person. The similarities that are found can be used for foretelling the person’s performance as well as their behaviour, because these similarities help in finding the collective attributes present in the human nature (Hogan & Shelton, 2006) . On the other hand the variances help in measuring the individual performances and are very beneficial in describing both human behaviours along with performances. Even the experts in the field of personality  believe that  every individual has  quite long term as well as stable traits  that cast impact on the  employees behaviour at their workplace (Denissen et al., 2011 ; Gerber et al., 2011 ).

Personality and Related Theories

 In some of the researches conducted on personality , the scholars found that  personality acts as quite effective tool  that helps in prediction of the job performances of employees in any organization (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006 ; Schulman, 2011). This technique is mostly used by the Organizational Behaviour scholars as well as leaders during the process of personnel selection within organizations (Barrick & Mount, 2000).  In the organizational behaviour stream there has been major focus of researchers on both personality as well as organizational outcomes. According to the ;latest studies  personality does cast impact  on the environments in which the individuals live (Chen, 2004) (Barrick et al., 2002) and it also plays critical role  in choosing the situation in which  the individual person makes a decision to stay . The preferences given to the organizational environments, the activities liked by individual as well as the cycle of individuals with which one thinks of interacting, all depends upon the individual’s personality (Barrick & Mount, 2000) . Such kind of values is also found to be strongly related to person-organization (P-O) fit.

In this highly competitive world there is no such organization that depicts an unchanging or subservient behaviour and this mainly arises from the culture (Silverthorne, 2004) . Culture is one such aspect that helps in finding how much perfectly “a person “fits” in a specific organization as the “fit” represents the feeling of comfort with that culture” (Oreilly 2004; p 10). It is directly connected with the employee’s output levels as well as helps in finding the turnover of employee in any organization (Schmidt & Ryan, 1993) . Any culture that is present and prevalent in any organization helps in development of customs related to employee behaviour, which in turn is effected by the P-O fit that finally impacts the end organizational output (Silverthorne, 2004) . Therefore, this clearly establishes the reality the personality traits of employee has positive connection with organizational productivity. This also gives a clarity regarding the fact that if the traits of the employees are matching the organizational culture, then the productivity of the organization will certainly be improved or increased as desired by the organization.

In the research related to personality the literature  indicates certain personality theories  that are the key theories   like : Psychoanalytic Theories;  Biological theories;  Humanistic Theories;  Trait Theories as well as  Behavioural , Social learning and  Cognitive theories. Amongst all these theories  of personality  “trait theory”  is the one that is widely acceptable  as well as considered to be a, leading personality related theory  that also  considers the salient features  that have  more tendency  of leading towards certain  specific behaviours. The variances  shown by the person  in the  trends towards development of  a steady  pattern of  actions , thoughts as well as feelings  are called a traits (Myers, 1998) . All the theories that are related to personality traits indicate that the behaviour of a person can be determined with the help of certain personality traits. Thus the Big Five Personality Theory also known as Big Five Model or the Five Factor Model or FFM has been considered the most widely acceptable model for personality. It demonstrates that the personality of human beings consists of five very reasonable as well as self determining aspects that provide a complete taxonomy as well as helps in reviewing the dissimilarities of an individual. It rather provides the real core present in the human nature because of these dissimilarities . Thus personality in general can be  divided and then examined  with the help of five highly  distinguishable as well as  distinct elements that are :  Character;  Disposition,  Temperament,  Intellect along with Temper. The five characteristic elements of the Big Five Model are:  Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Extraversion along with Conscientiousness.

The Big Five Model

Openness is mainly connected with creativity at their workplace and there might be an unknown connection between job performance and creativity (George & Zhou, 2001) . For example any creative individual can unintentionally help in enhancing the productivity by coming up and implementing innovative or highly unique methods at workplace.  Openness shows a positive correlation with standardized measures related to achievement as well as knowledge and it is found to be modestly connected with cognitive ability. Out of all the Big Five traits openness has highest correlation with verbal score of SAT (Noftle & Robins, 2007) .

Out of the five  crucial and important  personality factors  ‘conscientiousness’  is found to be highly consistent  as well as a major predictor  in case of workplace performance (Barrick & Mount, 2000 ; Behling, 1998 ; Dudley et al., 2006) . For example  when conducted a meta analysis  regarding the  prediction of job performance of employees  considering the personality dimensions  it shows that  the broad measures of conscientiousness  helps in predicting the  overall job performance (Barrick et al., 2001) and it also assists in  controlling the cognitive ability of employees (Hough & Oswald, 2008) . Along with the overall job performance , several broad measures related to conscientiousness  have shown that they help in predicting  several other valuable  behaviours of employees at workplace  for example leadership , organizational citizenship  along with  undesirable  behaviours for example  procrastination (Judge & Ilies, 2002) . Therefore conscientiousness is considered to be the best noncognitive performance predictor that can be used across wide variety of work results as well as job types.

The people exhibiting neurotic behaviour are found to be less happy, that also impacts the employee’s ability to do the tasks assigned in proper manner (Colquitt et al., 2009) . The people who are neurotic are found to be  showing lesser job satisfaction  , moreover they are more likely  to fixate  as well as remember the past negative experiences  that they encountered at the workplace (Watson & Clark, 1984). Such kind of features exhibited by neurotics influences both the job performance of the employees as well as their feelings regarding their job. The neuroticism comes associated with insecurity and this can finally lead to leaving or quitting the job (Mkoji & Sikalieh, 2012) as well as dissatisfaction amongst the individual in relation to their job (Beer & Brooks, 2011) . This might be the result of uncertainty regarding job performance or the individual’s inability to perform or complete the task (Judge & Hies, 2002) . Neuroticism is one such trait that is found to be helpful in case of the jobs that need novel ideas along with formation of creative suggestions (Colquitt et al., 2009).

Openness and Conscientiousness

Extraverts are the people who look for social relationships with their co-workers, finally resulting in increased relationships within their organizations. They also tend to show swift socialization as well as integration within their organization (Louis et al., 1983 ; McCrae & Costa, 1991).  This kind of process that helps in integration is found to be associated with positive work performance along with reduced likelihood of the employees to quit (Colquitt et al., 2009 ; Maertz & Campion, 2004). Occupations are found to be positively linked with extraversion, mainly with the jobs that need training proficiency, leadership abilities as well as social interactions (Lim & Ployhart, 2004) . Extraversion is found to be positively associated with leadership abilities (Lim & Ployhart, 2004) along with level of job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2002) . Therefore in the workplace the extraverts are found to exhibit  higher levels of satisfaction  because of their ability  to  go through  simulations of optimal levels  within the social environment , whereas the introverts  are reported to show  lesser job satisfactions because of this reason (Neubert & Taggar, 2004).

 Agreeable individuals show  the ability to adapt  that helps them to  establish as well as maintain  healthy  relationship that is rewarding also at the same time , with their  colleagues , place of business as wells  co-workers  (Olver & Mooradian, 2003).  Some of the qualities that are associated with agreeableness for example thoughtfulness, kindness and likeability, tends to result in successful relationships with their co-workers. This also enhances employee commitment as it encourages the employee to stay with the organization for long term. The positive opinion held by the workers regarding the work environment helps in enhancing performance along with increasing their motivation to stick to the job (Meyer & Allen, 1991) . Most of the times it has been found that agreeable employees are very much  high performing individuals  as they are forever willing  to  understand as well as adapt to  their current environment at work . In case of interpersonal oriented jobs and to help others agreeableness helps in prediction of performance that took a significant one. Unlike various other personality features for example Conscientiousness, Agreeableness is not found to be connected with bringing in success amongst the workforce for all kinds of jobs, because some of the occupations need certain level of disagreeableness in order to achieve success (Mkoji & Sikalieh, 2012) . In the same way Agreeableness is negatively connected with the leadership abilities, on the other hand it has positive correlation with the working with the teams (Noftle & Robins, 2007) .

 Job performance can be defined as the participation shown by employees in order to achieve the organizational goals (Awadh & Wan Ismail, 2012) . One of the very crucial and dependent variables that have been researched for past many decades is the job performance. AS per the theory job performance is a multidimensional construct that ahs a contextual dimension as well as a task dimension (Bhatti et al., 2014) . The overall value that can be predicted and has been derived from the behaviour of employees carried out over a particular set of time period is called as the job performance (Motowildo et al., 1997) . The job performance of employees certainly impacts the   organizational outcomes and it also makes sure that the organizational functioning is all right. Job performance also comprises of skills as well as knowledge that helps in guiding the employees to conduct several activities in the organization.

 The researchers have also argued that the relationship between the Big Five personality and the job performance are much more result of social aspects related to the workplace as compared to their ability (Neubert & Taggar, 2004) . This indicates that the organizations need to cast positive impressions amongst the employees regarding themselves. Thus the behavioural pattern of any good leader in the form of a leader is one who provides full cooperation, speaks in favourable manner as well as provides support that goes beyond the job performance of the employees.

People belonging to different kinds of backgrounds will be possessing different kinds of norms, values or attitudes, rather such people also have different cultural heritages. Definitely during their work environments they will show their personal cultural heritages. Such kinds of differences will definitely give rise to different personalities of any individual that finally helps in finding their behaviours or actions that finally impact the leader-follower interactions. So in some cases the leaders might be possessing strong or weaker personality that impacts other performances of the employees as well as it also determines the manner in which the organization will be performing (Alkahtani et al., 2011) . Thus the personality traits of the leaders are much reasonable in the sense to expect that it can also affect the personal attitudes as well as values as per the research done in the field (Olver & Mooradian, 2003). Openness towards experiences is positively connected with very many successful training activities. An open individual mainly shows optimistic attitude towards learning and he/ she really enjoys learning that casts a positive impact on the training outcomes .

Conclusion

The above analysis indicates that there exists a correlation between personality as well as job performance. However Agreeableness along with Openness towards experiences is found o show close relation with job performance. Research has also shown that Emotional stability as well as Conscientiousness is also found to be connected with job performance. Both Agreeablenesses along with Openness to experience show a stronger relationship with the various criterions used for training. The basic four variables of personality traits that is Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness have positive as well as significant connection with the job performance of the employees. On the other hand neuroticism has a negative correlation with job performance. It is crucial for the leaders and scholars of organizational behaviour to use this knowledge while doing personnel selections or hiring because job performance which is related to the personality traits of employees also impacts the reputation as well as productivity of the organization. The personality of leaders plays vital role because it impacts the job performance of the employees. Thus some of the good determining factors that the leaders should consider  regarding leadership personality includes  agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to  experience as it will help in  increasing the job performance  because personality is found to be linked with  the performance of their followers.

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