The Five Factors Of Emotional Stability And Conscientiousness

Organizations in the private and public sectors have long been striving to improve employees’ job performance. It is well acknowledged that job performance depends on a variety of factors (Hunter & Hunter, 1984; Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hunter, 1986; Judge & Bono, 2001; Beehr et al., 2000). One of the factors that caught a lot of academic attention is personality. The question of whether personality measures are valid predictors of job performance has been tested by many researchers around the world. While early empirical studies showed little support for the relationship between personality traits and job performance, the advent and consolidation of the Five Factor Model organized the taxonomy of personality and resulted in a body of research

Conscientiousness is expected to correlate with job performance because it assesses personal characteristics such as responsible, persistent, and hardworking, all of which are important attributes for job accomplishment. Emotional Stability is an opposite extreme of Neuroticism, a worry, nervous temperament that inhibits the accomplishment of work tasks (Barrick & Mount, 1991). On the basis of meta-analytic studies, Schmidt and Hunter (1998) analyzed the validity of 19 selection techniques for predicting job performance and found that the personality trait of Conscientiousness was among the central determining variables in job performance. They explained that employees who scored higher on Conscientiousness developed higher levels of job knowledge, which in turn led to higher levels of job performance. In their large-scale meta-analysis, Barrick and Mount (1991) showed that Conscientiousness had the highest validity and was generalizable for all job performance criteria and occupational groups. However, Emotional Stability was found to have a rather weak correlation with overall job performance criteria in this study. Although the authors explained that it might be a result of a range restriction

From a practitioner’s perspective, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are most likely to be used to predict job performance in all jobs. Measures from other personality dimensions can be tested to predict specific job performance construct in specific occupations. For example, one may test Openness to Experience to predict training proficiency and test Extraversion to predict sales performance. Personality testing in organizations has the potential to facilitate decision-making process, greatly improving organizational