Retaining The Productive Employee The Role of Pers

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Retaining the Productive Employee: The Role of

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Article in The Academy of Management Annals · June 2014

DOI: 10.1080/19416520.2014.890368
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Retaining the Productive

Employee: The Role of
Personality
a b c
Ning Li , Murray R. Barrick , Ryan D. Zimmerman &
d
Dan S. Chiaburu
a
Tippie College of Business, The University of Iowa
b
Mays Business School, Texas A&M University
c
Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech
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To cite this article: Ning Li, Murray R. Barrick, Ryan D. Zimmerman & Dan S. Chiaburu
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The Academy of Management Annals, 2014
Vol. 8, No. 1, 347– 395, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2014.890368
Retaining the Productive Employee:

The Role of Personality
NING LI*
Tippie College of Business, The University of Iowa
MURRAY R. BARRICK
RYAN D. ZIMMERMAN
Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech University
DAN S. CHIABURU
Abstract
Prior meta-analyses and quantitative reviews have examined the construct-
related true-score correlations by personality in predicting important organiz-
ational outcomes or have focused on relatively specific, practical problems
generally associated with using personality tests in selection. However, there
lacks a theoretical integration of major theories developed in the literature. In
this review, we propose an integrative research paradigm for personality
research by identifying key mediating and moderating mechanisms explaining
why, how and when personality traits predict employee work effectiveness.
Based on the compatibility principle, we develop a theoretical model to
∗
Corresponding author. Email: ning-li-1@uiowa.edu
# 2014 Academy of Management
347
348 † The Academy of Management Annals
reconceptualize the effect of the five-factor model (FFM) on broadly defined

work effectiveness outcomes. We contend researchers have not exploited the
breadth of the FFM bandwidth and thus have underestimated the predictive
power of personality. In support of our new propositions, we systematically
review the almost overwhelming literature by focusing on retaining productive
employees, in order to contribute theoretically by identifying a few key general-
izable findings and to improve managerial efficiency by uncovering possible
“best practices”.
Personality is a core construct. To understand why people behave the way they
do in organizations, one must know something about the individual’s person-
ality. While personality is not the only cause of behavior, it constantly sways
our behavior at work. More importantly, personality has been shown to influ-
ence two sets of behaviors critical to any organization: employee performance
and employee withdrawal from the organization. Not surprisingly, there have
been hundreds, if not thousands, of primary studies examining the role of per-
sonality in predicting these behaviors at work. Over the past two decades, this
accumulated evidence has been subjected to a number of meta-analyses to
determine the generalizability of these effects. Previous reviews and quantitat-
ive meta-analyses have focused on construct-related true-score correlations or
relatively specific, practical problems generally associated with using personal-
ity tests in selection (Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001; Oswald & Hough, 2011)
but typically lack theoretical integration with prominent theories developed in
the literature. In addition to using personality to predict work performance
from a selection perspective, scholars studying different management phenom-
ena (e.g. goal orientation, Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien, 2007) often rely on
personality traits to understand their etiologies. Although it is hard to think of
many management theories in which personality is not relevant and has not at
some point been invoked, this leaves personality research (broadly construed)
scattered across the theoretical landscape.
In this review, we shift the focus to personality’s relationship with behavior,
specifically behavior linked to work effectiveness—construed broadly as per-
formance at work (task, contextual, and proactive) and withdrawal or separ-
ation from that work (absenteeism, turnover, and counterproductive
behaviors). By doing so, we attempt to systematically review the almost over-
whelming literature by focusing on retaining productive employees, in order to
enhance our theoretical understanding by identifying a few key generalizable
findings and to improve managerial efficiency by uncovering possible “best
practices”. Our intent is to stimulate research on personality as a focal topic
and to simultaneously inform the broader community of management
researchers who draw on personality to enhance their own theories about per-
formance and withdrawal.
Retaining the Productive Employee † 349
We begin with a short primer on the fundamental role of personality at

work. Next, we summarize past work to comprehensively illustrate various
models and theories being tested to illustrate the complexities of research on
personality recognizing relevant moderators and mediators and to propose
ways in which future researchers might extend their own models and theories
by accounting for differences in personality across employees. Third, we high-
light the role of the interrelationships among components of personality, per-
formance, and withdrawal that collectively reveals the importance of
aggregation. Given the need to empirically substantiate our propositions, we
conduct a quantitative review to demonstrate the importance of applying the
compatibility principle to understand the relationships between personality –
work effectiveness. We also suggest future directions for personality research
along the way.
There is also value in clarifying what this review will not do. Our intent here
is not to review personality from a selection utility standpoint. A large number
of recent quantitative reviews have presented evidence of the magnitude of val-
idity coefficients, the existence of sub-group differences, and whether these
relationships are biased by faking or measurement (Barrick et al., 2001;
Cortina, Goldstein, Payne, Davison, & Gilliland, 2000; Foldes, Duehr, &
Ones, 2008; Komar, Brown, Komar, & Robie, 2008; Oswald & Hough, 2011;
Shaffer & Postlethwaite, 2012). From another direction, nearly 50 years ago,
Mischel (1968) argued that personality had limited predictive validity
because the correlation with behavior rarely exceeded a .30 value. This
concern was recently reiterated by a panel of scholars who also concluded
that personality lacks predictive efficacy (Morgeson et al., 2007). In this
review, we summarize empirical evidence that shows personality traits are
important and based on the massive weight of accumulated evidence
(Barrick et al., 2001), have a functional relationship with how effectively
employees perform their jobs and whether they remain engaged with work.
However, we do not re-visit the person– situation debate. Therefore, we will
avoid arguing whether personality is more powerful than situational predictors
or organizational interventions. Instead, our purpose is to clarify ways person-
ality traits are likely to be theoretically relevant to nearly every topic in organ-
izational behavior (OB) as either a distal antecedent or by jointly influencing
behavior along with relevant situational factors.
A Primer on Personality’s Effects on Behavior

The study of human behavior, especially how effectively we perform at work
and whether we remain in a job, is fundamental to OB. One important deter-
minant of such behavior is our personality (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006;
Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). Over the past 25 years,
researchers have conducted numerous studies proposing that personality
traits, which reflect an individual’s enduring patterns of cognition, motivation,

and behavior exhibited across contexts (Goldberg, 1993), should have a func-
tional relationship with how effectively employees perform their jobs, and
whether they remain engaged with work (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Five key
personality traits arising from the Big Five model are frequently examined,
although some researchers believe better prediction can be achieved by focus-
ing on lower level traits (Hough, 1998; Marinova, Moon, & Kamdar, 2013;
Oswald & Hough, 2011), through personality composites (Ones, Dilchert, Vis-
wesvaran, & Judge, 2007), or occasionally, higher-order latent constructs
(Digman, 1997).
Following the preponderance of evidence (Ashton, Lee, Goldberg, & de
Vries, 2009; McCrae et al., 2008), we focus on the five-factor constructs, includ-
ing conscientiousness (dependability, achievement, and persistence), emotion-
al stability (calm, steady, and self-confident), extraversion (ambitious, sociable,

and narcissistic), agreeableness (cooperative, altruistic, and trustworthy), and
openness to experience (creative, thoughtful, and novelty-seeking) rather
than on either facets or on higher-order factors. Other trait researchers have
recently invoked include core self-evaluation (emotional stability, generalized
self-efficacy, self-esteem, and locus of control; Judge, Bono, Erez, & Locke,
2005), promotion or prevention regulatory focus (nurturance, approach
versus security, and avoidance; Wallace & Chen, 2006), or goal orientation
(mastery, learning versus performance, and avoid; Payne et al., 2007). A
back to the future focus on psychological needs or higher-order implicit
goals has also occurred, including such goals as striving for accomplishment,
status, communion, and autonomy (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013; Deci &
Ryan, 2000; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005). These approaches typically highlight
universal goals or needs that everyone strives to attain, at least to some
extent, to lead fulfilling, engaging lives. By focusing on the five-factor model
(FFM) of personality we provide a comprehensive framework for theoretical
development while simultaneously covering all of these other traits.
In the past 25 years, there has been a number of meta-analyses that collec-
tively provide ample evidence that these specific personality traits are impor-
tant factors in the determination of job performance (Barrick & Mount,
1991; Barrick et al., 2001; Hogan & Holland, 2003; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette,
Kamp, & McCloy, 1990; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000; Salgado, 1997). In addition
to job performance, personality traits have been linked with other important
work behaviors, including contextual performance or organizational citizen-
ship behavior (OCB, Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, & Gardner, 2011), counterpro-
ductive work behavior (CWB, Berry, Carpenter, & Barratt, 2012; Berry,
Ones, & Sackett, 2007), and turnover (Zimmerman, 2008). Although the mag-
nitude of the relationships for individual traits rarely exceeds .30 (Mischel,
1968; Nisbett, 1980), the size of these effects are comparable to those found
when specific job characteristics are enriched (Humphrey, Nahrgang, &
Morgeson, 2007) or job satisfaction itself when related to job performance

(Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002). Consequently, while these relations are
modest, they are significant predictors of human behavior. Even more to the
point, given that human behavior has multiple determinants, it makes sense
for differences in personality to provide only one cause or explanation for
our behavior.
Recent findings have also revealed some unique properties that researchers
must account for to fully understand the nature of the relationship between per-
sonality and these two key outcomes (i.e. performance and withdrawal). First,
these predictions are seen to be important because personality itself is relatively
stable over long periods of time (Conley, 1985; Roberts & Del Vecchio, 2000;
Roberts & Robins, 2000) in part because of genetic predispositions (Eley, Lich-
tenstein, & Moffitt, 2003; Ferguson, 2010; Knafo & Plomin, 2006; Nettle, 2006).
This means the dispositional explanations for behavior uncovered in this review
will be long-standing and reveal that organizations may gain substantial utility
from productivity gains every single day for years and years. Therefore, it is
vital to understand how personality predicts global evaluations of employees’
contributions to organizational objectives rather than employees’ moment-
to-moment behavior changes (Campbell, 1990).
Second, research has recently illustrated that there are trait complexes
(Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Barrick, Mount, & Gupta, 2003; Kotov,
Gamez, Schmidt, & Watson, 2010) that suggests there may be synergistic
gains from aggregation as traits can covary in systematic ways to influence
these two key outcomes. The third key issue that has recently been revealed
is that different assessment approaches, including the use of observer-ratings
of personality traits, can be used to predict performance (Connelly & Ones,
2010; Oh, Wang, & Mount, 2011; Zimmerman, Triana, & Barrick, 2010) and
have nearly twice the magnitude of prediction as do self-ratings. Thus, it
may very well be that different measurement approaches may reveal more
substantial effects for personality than previously found using self-report
questionnaires (Funder, 2009). For all of these reasons, personality is now
treated as an important predictor of key behavioral outcomes. At the
same time, we now have a more realistic appreciation of the challenges
and opportunities when using personality as an important predictor in
work settings.
Although previous quantitative reviews and meta-analyses have established
personality as a critical determinant of employee work behavior, they tend to
overlook theories that explain how, why, and when personality predicts human
behavior. In other words, there lacks a systematic integration of various models
and theories developed in the literature. To remedy this limitation, in the fol-
lowing section, we review major theories and attempt to gain a better under-
standing of the pathways and boundary conditions that impact the effect of
personality.
Theories of Personality as a Predictor of Work Performance and Withdrawal

Over the past 25 years, there has been a veritable explosion of theories of per-
sonality, both in the form of primary studies and comprehensive meta-analytic
reviews, to reveal the mediating and moderating mechanisms through which
personality traits are linked to work effectiveness. We conduct an overview
of this research to enhance our understanding of what is “known” and what
“gaps” can be revealed in the literature. We direct considerable attention
toward underlying mediating mechanisms, including processes linked to moti-
vational mediators and key work-related attitudes, in order to further theoreti-
cal formulations of how personality affects these fundamental outcomes.
Furthermore, we examine major theories specifying the boundary conditions
of the effects of personality on employee behavior (e.g. situational strength,
Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010; trait activation theory, Tett & Burnett, 2003;
the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS), Mischel & Shoda, 1995; a
job characteristic model, Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Specifically, these the-
ories rely on a common premise arguing that human behavior is a product
of the interaction of personality and situation. However, the theories differ
in several important ways in terms of the role of personality, the role of the
situation, and the specificity of the predictions. Our review also covers
recent research unifying both mediating and moderating mechanisms of per-
sonality (e.g. the theory of purposeful work behavior, TPWB; Barrick et al.,
2013). For all of these reasons, an overview that summarizes our current
knowledge about personality at work is necessary, in order to influence the
visionary application of personality in future research in management and
Figure 1 Theoretical Frameworks for the Effects of Personality Traits.

OB. An integrative framework, including major theories and models of person-

ality, is presented in Figure 1 and explained in detail in the next section.
Mediating Mechanisms
Personality traits are habitual ways of thinking and doing across situations.
Conceptually, this highlights three key necessities of these traits, that they:
(1) are dispositional, consistent, long-lasting constructs in part arising from
genetic determinants; (2) represent internal agency, depicting the dynamic
organization within the self that determine characteristic, habitual thoughts,
feelings, and actions; and (3) have personal distinctiveness such that even “uni-
versalistic variables” (Deci & Ryan, 2000) can vary across people in degree of
strength or applicability to understand behavior. Through these traits, we

can “provide the best estimate of what a person is most likely to do” (Fiske
& Butler, 1963, p. 258) in any given situation. As we will summarize below, per-
sonality affects behavior primarily through motivational processes and other
mechanisms that indirectly influence one’s motivation. Specifically, among
the key mediator variables that are expected to explain the process through
which personality influences job performance are more proximal motivational
indicators, such as goal setting, self-efficacy, and expectancies (Chen, Casper, &
Cortina, 2001; Judge & Ilies, 2002) as well as key work-related attitudes, includ-
ing job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and burnout (Bruk-Lee,
Khoury, Nixon, Goh, & Spector, 2009; Judge et al., 2002; Ng, Eby, Sorensen,
& Feldman, 2005; Swider & Zimmerman, 2010; Zimmerman, 2008).
Before discussing the potential mechanisms through which personality
influences behavior, it is important to establish the causal link between the
two. One particularly causal form of evidence assesses personality months or
years prior to predicting behavior. Longitudinal analyses indicate that person-
ality, assessed in childhood, predicts career success over 50 years later (Judge,
Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999). As demonstrated by Judge et al. (1999),
early assessment of personality (at ages 16, 17, and 18) predicted success in
one’s career (measured by salary, career status, and rate of promotion) up to
age 60, with a multiple correlation of .51 for personality (with observed corre-
lations of .41 for conscientiousness, .34 for emotional stability, .26 for openness
to experience, and .18 for extraversion). Clearly, the existence of significant
effects for personality on employee effectiveness spanning over 40 or even
50 years is convincing evidence that personality affects behavior across
situations.
Motivational processes. Theoretically, differences in these personality

traits across employees predict work effectiveness primarily through their
long-lasting dispositional influences on work motivation. The direction, inten-
sity, and persistence of motivated behavior ultimately must arise from within
the individual (Kanfer, Chen, & Pritchard, 2008; Mitchell & Daniels, 2003) and
not surprisingly, personality has a significant effect on whether the person is
motivated at work. In fact, in many respects, personality can be conceptualized
as the “motor” driving one’s actions to try to fulfill the dynamic desires and
preferences arising from within the person (Barrick et al., 2013). It is this mech-
anism that leads personality to be theoretically relevant to nearly every topic in
OB.
Specifically, to enhance understanding of how personality influences typical
behavior at work, it is important to realize that motivational processes will be
the key mediator underlying this relationship. Several broad approaches have
dominated attention in the relevant literature and will serve as the organizing
framework around which these key motivational processes are described. The
first uses goals as purposeful representations of desired internal states to
explain the self-regulatory processes guiding one’s actions. Although there

are many aspects to the self-regulatory actions of the individual, personality
traits are expected to influence the valence of a goal as a well as the strength
of the response to discrepancies between one’s actual and desired states
(Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005) through
both conscious and subconscious regulatory processes. For example, extra-
verted employees will exert more effort to achieve a goal if doing so leads to
a reward (Stewart, 1996).
The second takes a resource-based view to explain motivational choices
(Halbesleben & Bowler, 2007; Smillie, Yeo, Furnham, & Jackson, 2006).
From this perspective, action is contingent on activation of one’s “resources”
or the amount of energy the individual has available to expend or continue
to expend. Personality is thought to be one source of additional resources.
The third way personality affects work effectiveness is through task-focused
motivational processes. Conscientiousness has been established as a valid pre-
dictor of job performance across jobs (Barrick & Mount, 1991) and the mech-
anism by which this trait affects effectiveness has been found to be through its
focus on task-related behavior (Judge & Ilies, 2002). In fact, conscientiousness
has been referred to as work-related motivation (Mount & Barrick, 1995).
Essentially, prior studies reveal that the major mechanism by which distal
personality traits influence employee effectiveness is through its continuous
sway over proximal motivational measures, including task self-efficacy, per-
formance expectancies, and goal-directed performance (Judge & Ilies, 2002).
Thus, personality affects behavior through the task-specific motivational pro-
cesses that regulate individuals’ action plans or task activities leading to goal
persistence and accomplishment. Such processes are too numerous and
varied to enumerate, but include how efficacious or confident people are
that working hard will lead to higher performance, the benefits individuals
anticipate if they achieve the performance goal, and their commitment to
and willingness to persist toward goals linked to performance (Judge & Ilies,
2002; Locke, 1991). More importantly, these effects on task-specific motiva-

tional processes are continuous, as personality tends to impact these processes
across numerous and varied situations, year-after-year, at work (Judge et al.,
1999; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006; Roberts et al., 2007).
Empirically, across 65 studies, Judge and Ilies (2002) meta-analyzed the
relationships between the FFM personality traits and three key motivational
outcomes (i.e. goal setting, expectancy, and self-efficacy) and found that
emotional stability and conscientiousness had the strongest and most consist-
ent effects on motivation. Overall, the Big Five constructs had an average mul-
tiple correlation of .49 with the motivational variables. Given the predominant
role of these three motivational criteria in driving employee work behavior,
they likely serve as key mediating mechanisms in the relationship between
the FFM and employee work effectiveness.
Similarly, research evidence also suggests that individuals differ in likeli-

hood to withdraw from work (Ghiselli, 1974; Judge & Watanabe, 1995).
Most theoretical withdrawal models include individual differences as an
important predictor (Hom & Griffeth, 1995; March & Simon, 1958; Mobley,
Griffeth, Hand, & Meglino, 1979; Steers & Mowday, 1981; Zimmerman,
2008), and posit motivation and satisfaction-based intervening mechanisms
(Judge & Larsen, 2001; Swider & Zimmerman, 2010; Thoresen, Kaplan,
Barsky, Warren, & de Chermont, 2003; Zimmerman, 2008). In a recent
process model, Zimmerman, Boswell, Shipp, Dunford, and Boudreau (2012)
found that the relationship between personality and withdrawal behavior
was also partially mediated through work perceptions, self-efficacy to attract
new job offers, ambition, and financial need. These findings reveal that person-
ality affects both performance and withdrawal primarily through job attitudes
and motivated work behavior.
Affect and satisfaction. To fully understand how personality influences

work effectiveness, it is also instrumental to recognize the ways through
which the motivational effect attributed to various personality traits is mani-
fested at work. One important motivational mechanism is affect, but in the
case of personality this is limited to mood rather than emotion. Mood is
long lasting, less intense, and more diffusely directed at a target than
emotion (Lord & Kanfer, 2002). Miner and Glomb (2010) recently illustrated
that mood precedes behavior, although it is not possible to rule out reciprocal
causation. Emotional stability and extraversion, as indicators of negative and
positive affectivity (Thoresen et al., 2003), are expected to have pervasive
effects on the dispositional way the person responds to stimuli broadly
arising from the job and social setting. Consequently, the more affect is
expected to act as an antecedent or consequence to motivation or behavior,
or to be crucial to the self-regulatory process (Carver & Scheier, 1990, 1998;
Ilies & Judge, 2005), the more important the affect-driven personality traits will
be to the relationships being examined.
Relatedly, researchers have also linked the Big Five traits with job satis-
faction (Judge et al., 2002), which serves as a valid predictor of various
employee work behaviors (Harrison, Newman, & Roth, 2006). Overall job
satisfaction reflects employees’ affective evaluation of their jobs, and is par-
tially determined by individuals’ dispositional traits (Judge et al., 2002;
Levin & Stokes, 1989; Weiss, Nicholas, & Daus, 1999). Specifically,
among the Big Five traits, extraversion and emotional stability had consist-
ent effects on job satisfaction across studies. Overall, the Five-Factor traits
as a set had a multiple correlation of .41 with job satisfaction (Judge
et al., 2002), indicating the importance of the FFM in determining one’s
job attitudes. In an attempt to test the mediating role of job satisfaction
in the relationship between personality and work behavior, Ilies, Fulmer,

Spitzmuller, and Johnson (2009) found that conscientiousness and agree-
ableness had significant indirect effects on employee citizenship behavior
via job satisfaction.
Social relationships. The importance of social relationships to motivation

and behavior has recently experienced a resurgence of research interest (Chia-
buru & Harrison, 2008; Humphrey et al., 2007). Research reveals that person-
ality traits like extraversion and agreeableness are key determinants of work
effectiveness when interpersonal relationships matter (Barbuto & Moss,
2006; Bell, 2007; Bono & Judge, 2004; Boyatzis, Good, & Massa, 2012).
Mount, Barrick, and Stewart (1998), for example, found that agreeableness
was the most important personality predictor of team success. Similarly,
Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002) found extraversion to be linked to
leader behavior, particularly transformational leadership. The accumulated
evidence clearly establishes a substantial foundation for sustaining the position
that personality matters when predicting work effectiveness particularly when
that work is dependent on successful interpersonal relationships.
These findings illustrate that to understand the processes through which
specific personality traits are linked to work effectiveness, researchers can
focus on motivation, affect, and social relationships processes. Recognizing
these different mechanisms will enable researchers to more accurately
identify which traits are relevant and deserve further attention. Although,
these perspectives contribute to our understanding of how personality
affects behavior, they insufficiently provide an integrative framework speci-
fying the fine-grained predictions of different personality traits and unique
mechanisms. Therefore, we review two important theories in personality
research to gain a deeper understanding of the mediating mechanisms of
personality.
Theories of Personality and Mediation

Socioanalytic theory. A socioanalytic perspective posits that individuals
strive to pursue two fundamental goals: getting along with others and
getting ahead to achieve status (Hogan, 1983). The theory is developed
based on an assumption that individuals are nested within groups, which are
structured in terms of status hierarchies (Hogan & Holland, 2003). Essentially,
socioanalytic theory represents a motivational perspective specifying two fun-
damental human motives. However, the theory also emphasizes that individ-
uals vary significantly in their motives and that personality traits are key
determinants of the motives (Digman, 1997; Wiggins & Trapnell, 1996). For
example, Digman (1997) posited that the Big Five traits could be organized
by two higher-order factors (an a factor consisting of agreeableness, conscien-
tiousness, and emotional stability; a ß factor consisting of extraversion and

openness), which correspond to some classic dichotomies in social psychology,
such as social interests versus superiority striving (Adler, 1939), and commu-
nion versus agency (Bakan, 1966; Wiggins, 1991). Thus, the a and ß factors
depict the same two fundamental motives. They also parallel the two dimen-
sions derived by DeYoung (2006) called stability and plasticity. Research
reveals these dimensions may have a biological and genetic basis with stability
being associated with the functioning of the serotonergic system regulating
emotional stability and plasticity capturing the functioning of the dopamin-
ergic system, responsible for approach and exploration (i.e. extraversion,
DeYoung, 2006). This provides additional evidence for the importance of
these dimensions. In addition to the two commonly studied motives (getting
along versus getting ahead motives), Hogan and Shelton (1998) later added
a third dimension or fundamental goal: finding meaning. While the other
two dimensions—getting along and getting ahead—closely align with several
personality traits (Bakan, 1966; Digman, 1997) as presented above, we see
finding meaning as aligned primarily with conscientiousness and, possibly,
with openness to experience, thereby drawing from the other two basic
motives to predict a third fundamental motive.
As a result, the socioanalytic perspective provides a theoretical foundation to
link the Big Five traits with unique motives (i.e. getting along, getting ahead, and
finding meaning) and corresponding work behaviors (Chiaburu et al., 2011; Oh
& Berry, 2009). Specifically, Hogan and Holland (2003) posited that agreeable-
ness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness are associated with getting
along, while openness, extraversion, and emotional stability are associated
with getting status. Based on the corresponding links between the personality
traits and motives, they further posit that individuals are particularly motivated
to engage in certain behaviors that are aligned with those motives, explaining the
increased validity of the Big Five traits. Similarly, a set of recent meta-analyses
based on this framework found that the Big Five traits differentially predicted
various employee work behaviors that would require different motives

(Chiaburu et al., 2011). For example, the authors found that extraversion and
openness were linked to behavior matching a getting ahead motive
(i.e. change-oriented behaviors) to a greater extent than other personality traits.
Cognitive-motivational strivings. In addition to socioanalytic theory,

Barrick et al. (2002) developed a model of cognitive-motivational strivings to
establish the specific links between the Big Five traits and individuals’ wants
and desires. The model includes three key motivational striving factors. Two
of them parallel the two broad motivational intentions identified in socioana-
lytic theory. Specifically, communion striving reflects the fundamental desire to
obtain acceptance and establish harmony in interpersonal relations (Hogan,
1996), while status striving captures an individual’s motivation to acquire
power, influence, and prestige within the organizational hierarchies (Bakan,

1966; Hogan, 1983). According to the socioanalytic perspective, communion
striving and status striving are relevant in contexts with high social interactions
(Hogan & Holland, 2003). However, individuals may also perform tasks in
contexts with limited social interactions. Therefore, Barrick et al. (2002)
added a third motivational striving dimension: accomplishment striving,
which reflects an individual’s task-focused orientation to gain competency
that can be independent of other people. Empirically, employee communion
striving was associated with agreeableness, accomplishment striving was
associated with conscientiousness, and status striving was linked with
extraversion.
Based on the three-dimensional model of cognitive motional strivings,
Barrick et al.’s (2013) new theory, the TPWB also recognized that individuals
have a fundamental desire to gain control and to pursue personal growth.
Therefore, a fourth dimension, autonomy and personal growth striving, reflect-
ing a desire to have discretion over job tasks, including what to do, when, and
how to do it (Deci & Ryan, 2000; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005; Mount, Barrick,
Scullen, & Rounds, 2005) as well as the pursuit of personal growth and learning
was added to the model. Because the TPWB integrates both motivational
mediators and moderating situational mechanisms through which personality
affects outcomes, we review this theory in detail in the following section.
Theories of Personality and Boundary Conditions

Many theories have been developed to understand the moderating mechan-
isms of the effects of personality. These include situational strength research
(Endler & Magnusson, 1976; Meyer, Dalal, & Bonaccio, 2009; Meyer et al.,
2010), trait activation theory (Tett & Burnett, 2003), the CAPS, and the
TPWB (Barrick et al., 2013). These theories embrace a central idea that
human behavior is a product of individual dispositional factors and the
environment where the person lives. Yet, they differ in several key aspects: the
driving force of behavior, the conceptualization of the situation, and the pro-
cesses of the interactions. For example, both situational strength research
and trait activation theory acknowledge that personality is the primary predic-
tor of the behavior, while CAPS emphasizes the dominant role of the situation
in driving specific behaviors. Whereas CAPS defines the situation in state-like
ways, the TPWB focuses on the job itself, emphasizing motivational job charac-
teristics (Hackman & Oldham, 1975) and social attributes (Hackman & Lawler,
1971; Humphrey et al., 2007).
Situational strength. Among theories of personality-situation interactions,

situational strength is perhaps most frequently invoked (Endler & Magnusson,
1976; Meyer et al., 2010). A key assumption of situational strength theory is
that the relationships between personality traits and behaviors are a function
of situational strength which is defined as implicit or explicit cues provided
by external entities regarding the desirability of potential behaviors (Meyer
et al., 2010). Situational strength is posited to suppress individuals from expres-
sing their tendencies to engage in particular courses of action. This pressure
thus reduces relevant behavioral variance and attenuates subsequent trait –
outcome relationships. For example, prior research has suggested a significant
negative relationship between agreeableness and voluntary turnover (Zimmer-
man, 2008). However, according to the underlying logic of situational strength
research, this correlation should be attenuated among employees who are
employed in a depressed job market, which prevents the unfettered pursuit
of alternative courses of action (Meyer et al., 2010).
Additionally, Meyer and colleagues systematically reviewed situational
strength research and clarified that the concept includes four facets: clarity,
consistency, constraints, and consequences. Based on these facets, a situation
can be conceptualized as either strong or weak. The strong situation attenuates
the personality-behavior relationship, while the weak situation accentuates it.
Thus, research on situation strength specifies a boundary condition of person-
ality and hence answers an important question of when personality traits
matter (i.e. in weak situations). Because the theory conceptualizes the situation
in a very broad way (i.e. weak versus strong), it often serves as an overarching
umbrella framework consisting of various moderators such as job autonomy
and job complexity (two commonly studied moderators in personality
research). In other words, many situations can be categorized as either
strong or weak. For example, using the situational strength argument,
Barrick and Mount (1993) found that conscientiousness and extraversion
had greater effects on job performance for managers in jobs high in autonomy
because job autonomy reflects the degree of constraints or latitude an employee
experiences and thus can be classified as a weak situation (Meyer et al., 2009).
The second moderator commonly examined is task complexity (Chen et al.,
2001). Personality, like cognitive ability, is expected to be an even more influ-

ential predictor of performance and motivation when tasks are more complex
rather than in simpler tasks (Martocchio & Judge, 1997; Schmidt & Hunter,
1998). Essentially, these two moderators are based on the idea of situational
strength. However, situational strength research can be criticized as oversim-
plifying the situation or capturing it very generally and thus not providing suf-
ficient specificity of predictions.
Trait activation theory. Another influential theory specifying the person-

ality –situation interaction is trait activation theory developed by Tett and
Burnett (2003). Compared to situational strength research, the theory offers
more specific predictions by positing that personality traits are expressed as
responses to trait-relevant situational cues. A key feature of the theory is the
focus on situation-trait relevance that certain traits and specific situations

may be matched together because of common cues (e.g. agreeable individuals
in teams encouraging cooperation). A situation is relevant to a trait if it is con-
nected due to the provision of cues, and where responses indicate a person’s
standing on the trait. Thus, individuals would tend to engage in certain beha-
viors as expressions of their traits when presented with trait-relevant situa-
tional cues. For example, working in teams provides social cues that activate
agreeable people’s tendencies to collaborate and engage in helping behaviors
toward teammates. Similarly, extraverts may exhibit competitive behaviors in
a situation using forced ranking. This theory is widely used in the field, as it
requires researchers to link situational cues to personality traits thereby provid-
ing an explicit test of the personality – situation interaction (Haaland & Chris-
tiansen, 2002; Li, Liang, & Crant, 2010; Lievens, Chasteen, Day, & Christiansen,
2006).
Cognitive-affective personality system. Both situational strength and trait

activation theory emphasize the driving role of personality in predicting behav-
ior and the moderating role of the situation. In contrast, Mischel and Shoda’s
(1995) CAPS takes a different outlook to conceptualize the personality-situ-
ation interaction. Specifically, the theory argues that an individual’s specific be-
havior in a given situation is dominantly determined by the situation itself.
Personality does not predict the behavior itself, but explains variance in behav-
ior across different situations. As a result, instead of predicting aggregated,
global employee behavior, the theory is useful in explaining changes in employ-
ees’ moment-to-moment behavior. This certainly limits the generalizability of
the theory because in real organizational settings, managers often value
employees’ long-term contributions.
The theory of purposeful work behavior. One final transition in this section
could be to focus on one integrative theoretical framework—the theory of pur-
poseful work behavior. Although a number of theories have been proposed to
explain the personality – situation interaction, they often overlook the mediat-
ing mechanisms that explain the interaction. In other words, P x E theories lack
a systematic approach to integrating the mediating and moderating processes
through which personality affects behavior. To remedy these limitations,
Barrick et al. (2013) developed TPWB, which integrates the two most domi-
nant theoretical perspectives in organizational research and considers the
joint effects of personality and job characteristics on employee motivational
states and subsequent behaviors. A key feature of the theory is to introduce
higher-order goals as the integrative mechanism that links the distal motiva-
tional forces from internal, individual sources (personality) and external, situa-
tional factors (task characteristics and social roles). The theory proposes that
individuals are striving to achieve four fundamental higher-order implicit
goals, including communion, status, achievement, and autonomy striving,
which lead to motivational processes (e.g. self-efficacy, action goals, and expec-
tations) and work outcomes. Specifically, Barrick et al. (2013) argued that per-
sonality traits initiate purposeful goal strivings, and when the motivational
forces derived from job and social characteristics match these purposeful striv-
ing goals, individuals tend to experience greater meaningfulness at work. In
turn, experienced meaningfulness triggers task-specific motivation processes
directly driving performance and withdrawal work behaviors.
The theory employs an agentic perspective (i.e. individuals are the “motor”
initiating motivational forces), which is a significant shift from the traditional
perspective that employee motivational forces are primarily imposed by exter-
nal, situational factors (Hackman & Oldham, 1975). For example, consider the
expanded job and social characteristics model (Hackman & Lawler, 1971;
Humphrey et al., 2007), meta-analytic evidence convincingly shows that
various classes of task or social characteristics are fulfilling for workers. It
goes on to propose that the reason this occurs is because doing the tasks or
engaging in the social relationships satiates three key psychological states
(Hackman & Oldham, 1975). What the theory fails to explicitly consider is
that one’s standing on the personality traits could serve as an underlying
causal influence that makes these psychological states salient to the person.
That is, to fully comprehend why job enrichment matters, we need to first
understand what motivates the person. To the extent personality is involved,
it introduces the notion that people will react differently to the various
changes associated with job enrichment. Thus, an individual’s standing on
these traits is likely to differentially affect the valence of the four fundamental
goal strivings held by that individual. Once those inner desires and strivings are
known, the individuals’ task, social, and power characteristics of the work
setting can be redesigned to optimally enhance their motivational impact.
These effects are however not limited to task, social, and power character-
istics of the job. In this review, whether considering the effects of job enrich-
ment, leadership, mentoring, person-job fit, goal setting, or organizational
culture and high-involvement work practices, personality has the potential to

influence the perception and interpretation of these key relationships. Wher-
ever motivation matters, Barrick and colleagues’ position is that an individual’s
standing on these personality traits is relevant and that it will help predict work
effectiveness better compared to when one does not account for personality.
In summary, our proposed moderation effects in Figure 1 are necessarily
broad particularly when combined with key mediators, and can inform
finer-grained predictions. In earlier research, to provide a basis for testing
boundary conditions for personality traits, scholars focused on moderators
that could accentuate or attenuate the relationship between personality traits
and more distal (performance) outcomes (e.g. the conscientiousness– perform-
ance relationship moderated by autonomy; Barrick & Mount, 1993). Using a
similar situational strength-based argumentation, we argue here that personal-
ity traits can be connected through a more complete model with links to both
proximal (e.g. consciousness to goal setting and mediator) and distal (perform-
ance and outcome) constructs, with all relationships moderated by the same
boundary condition (e.g. autonomy; cf. Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007).
The flexibility of the model is illustrated when one realizes different moderators
can also be posited for different parts of the model. The key is future research-
ers must clearly describe whether these theoretical moderators moderate the
effect on the mediators (e.g. TPWB) or moderate the effects of the mediator
on more distal outcomes (e.g. socioanalytic theory), as the interpretation of
each trait x situation moderation effect certainly is different.
From another direction, characteristics of the environment (specific tasks, job
characteristics, and role aspects) may act as moderators that strengthen the
relationship between personality and outcomes. On the one hand, over longer
periods of time, it is possible for one’s personality to change based on environ-
mental constraints or facilitators (Roberts, 2006; Wood & Roberts, 2006). On
the other hand, it could be that these cues from the environment have simply
allowed these pre-existing personality traits to exhibit stronger effects.
A Primer on Aggregating Personality

To set a firmer foundation to move the field forward, we believe it necessary to
underscore the critical role aggregation plays when establishing the ways in
which personality guides a variety of workplace behaviors. Global traits like
the FFM are often thought as most useful for explanation and theory develop-
ment, but that lower level traits are better in prediction (Oswald & Hough,
2011). However, by recognizing the import of aggregation one can see that
the global traits captured by the FFM predict employee effectiveness even
better than researchers have heretofore realized if we “match” the aggregation
breadth of these personality traits to equally broad overall performance and
withdrawal from work criteria.
Specifically, in the next section we develop a theoretical model based on the

principle of compatibility to reconceptualize the effects of personality on
broadly defined work outcomes. We then test this theoretical model using
meta-analytic procedures. It should be noted that our analysis is limited by
the empirical evidence available in the personality literature, thus a full test
of the model, including both mediating and moderating mechanisms, as pre-
sented in Figure 1 is not possible. Instead, the analyses we report next serves
as an initial step to demonstrate the importance of aggregating for personality
when determining employee work effectiveness. It is our hope that with the
further accumulation of empirical evidence in the literature, our integrative fra-
mework can serve as a guideline for future research. Our approach will also
summarize prior quantitative reviews that underscore the stability of personal-
ity to illustrate that gains in prediction from personality are long-lasting
phenomena, not fleeting reactions to external stimuli or to organizational

interventions.
The Role of the Compatibility Principle

Prior research has demonstrated the predictive validity of personality and, as
we discussed earlier, has also established mediating and moderating mechan-
isms through which personality influences employee behavior. Yet, a spirited
debate about the utility of personality in predicting important work outcomes
continues. To still be questioning the utility of personality after accumulating
such abundant data (Morgeson et al., 2007) is an elemental conundrum. There
are a number of explanations for this rather injudicious conclusion. Some have
to do with the plethora of constructs used to measure traits; others derive from
artifacts (such as sampling error and measurement error), potentially magnify-
ing differences in results across studies. One of the most compelling reasons for
debate related to the predictive validity of personality is also one of the most
fundamental: the inadequacy of existing theory to recognize the nearly unlim-
ited bandwidth of the FFM of personality when predicting employee perform-
ance and withdrawal.
Discussions of predictive validity quickly become discussions about the
importance of shifting from global traits to narrower traits to increase validity
(Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, & Crawford, 2013). However, this is only true if
the criterion is also narrow. Although narrower traits do take on the appear-
ance of being more fine-grained and precise, narrow constructs also offer
much less explanation (Funder, 2009). Below, we argue that the “explanatory
power” inherent in the global FFM traits has not been fully exploited in
prior research and consequently, may provide more useful answers to criteria
managers actually are keenly interested in—e.g. will this applicant or existing
employee be successful in doing the myriad of tasks required by this job
over the next three to five years? In the next section, we more fully advance
this issue by developing a theoretical framework and briefly summarizing

meta-analytic validities. Specifically, we conduct a quantitative analysis of
the meta-analytic data, to demonstrate for the first time, the value of broadly
defined personality traits when predicting equally broad coverage of work out-
comes, including employee performance and commitment to and engagement
in their work. The theoretical framework developed in this review relies pri-
marily on the compatibility principle, as formulated by Fishbein and Ajzen
(1974) and as applied to predicting specific behavior in a single instance
(Ajzen, 1991) to predicting broad behavioral criteria (Harrison et al., 2006).
In 1974, Fishbein and Ajzen concluded that very broad attitudes (e.g. overall
satisfaction toward one’s work role) would correlate highly with equally
broad behavioral outcomes (e.g. how engaged or motivated an employee is
over time) but not with a single instance of behavior (e.g. showing up at 2
pm on Friday for a meeting). Known as the compatibility principle, and

extended to personality in our review, the present conceptualization for max-
imizing the predictive validity of personality to higher performance and lower
withdrawal depends upon carefully matching predictors and outcomes to com-
patible levels of generality or aggregation.
Specifically, we propose that the true strength of the relationship between
the global FFM personality traits and work behavior has not been optimally
examined. Applying the compatibility principle led us to recognize that to
match or be compatible with the general, highly aggregated levels representa-
tive of contemporary models of personality (Barrick et al., 2001), the work
effectiveness criteria had to be equally broad, general effectiveness outcomes.
As summarized above, we focus on two broad work effectiveness constructs,
consisting of work performance and withdrawal behaviors, both critical to
any organization. These outcomes identify fundamentally different out-
comes—one assessing whether individuals perform their work well, the other
depicting their choice to withhold their work-related time and contributions.
The two higher-order latent behavioral effectiveness dimensions shown in
Figure 2 are sufficiently broad to capture all, or nearly all, individual-level
work behaviors deemed relevant to accomplishing organizational objectives.
More importantly, for the first time, our review examines whether behavioral
science research has underestimated the true predictive validity of the FFM
of personality by failing to aggregate behavior up to higher, more general,
levels of employee effectiveness. We believe that systematically reviewing the
effects of personality on broad outcomes is necessary because previous person-
ality research has extensively focused on predicting task or job performance,
while performance research clearly shows the significant impacts of other func-
tional and dysfunctional behaviors on organizational effectiveness (Grant &
Ashford, 2008; Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie 2006; Podsakoff, Whiting,
Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009). Importantly, some recent meta-analytic studies
examining the relationships between personality and functional behaviors at
Figure 2 Conceptual Framework for Connecting FFM with Employee Effectiveness.
work make it possible to further investigate how personality traits influence

broad work effectiveness criteria. The aggregation of work effectiveness out-
comes is presented in Figure 2.
As shown in Figure 2, we conceptualize work performance and employee

withdrawal behaviors as higher-order latent constructs. It is important to
note that there are two approaches to model a latent construct: as a reflective
measurement model or as a formative measurement model. The distinction
between the two models is based on the direction of the relationship
between the construct and its indicators: either from the construct to the
measures (reflective measurement) or from the measures to the construct (for-
mative measurement, Diamantopoulos, Riefler, & Roth, 2008). Previous
research on work behaviors has almost exclusively modeled higher-order
latent performance constructs using reflective models (Harrison et al., 2006,
Parker & Collins, 2010), which implies that the latent performance construct
(e.g. work effectiveness) causes specific performance dimensions (e.g. task per-
formance and contextual performance, Harrison et al., 2006). However, a for-
mative model is also possible since specific task or citizenship work behaviors
can be meaningfully distinguished and thus combining them into an overall
work effectiveness factor may simply represent overall value to the
organization.
For two reasons, however, we conceptualize the two higher-order effective-
ness constructs using the reflective measure model rather than formative
model. First, from a theoretical perspective, we view personality as the
“motor” driving one’s behaviors. Hence, performance and withdrawal
behaviors are the result of the individual striving to fulfill those traits, and con-
sequently, are reflective measures. Stated more succinctly, we assume the
higher-order work effectiveness constructs, at least to some extent, arise
from enduring personal attributes of the employee (e.g. a desirable or an unde-
sirable employee), which actually causes the employee to exhibit specific work
behaviors (e.g. high task performance or low withdrawal behavior).
Second, from an empirical perspective, accumulated evidence has revealed
strong correlations among specific performance dimensions (Harrison et al.,
2006; Podsakoff et al., 2009), which is consistent with the key assumption of
a reflective measurement model: all indicators must be positively intercorre-
lated (Bollen, 1984; Diamantopoulos et al., 2008). In contrast, in a formative
measurement model, indicators can be positively or negatively correlated
(Bollen, 1984). In fact, the observed strong positive correlations found
among job performance dimensions may cause multicollinearity and esti-

mation difficulties in formative models (Diamantopoulos et al., 2008).
Application of the compatibility principle theoretically extends the work of
researchers who have previously argued for the need to match broad person-
ality constructs, such as conscientiousness, with overall ratings of job perform-
ance (Barrick et al., 2001; Ones & Viswesvaran, 1996; Ones et al., 2007). In fact,
this leads us to propose even higher levels of aggregation. Evidence for the
utility of predicting aggregated performance behaviors with general personality
traits such as conscientiousness is supported when the same trait positively
influences not only the employees’ task performance, but also their contextual
(Borman & Motowidlo, 1997; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000) and proactive perform-
ance (Chiaburu et al., 2011; Parker & Collins, 2010). Despite the existence of
separate lines of research supporting this view (Barrick & Mount, 1991;
Hurtz & Donovan, 2000; Thomas, Whitman, & Viswesvaran, 2010), research-
ers have not considered that conscientiousness, as well as other FFM traits,
would predict to a greater extent an even broader performance outcome that
simultaneously combines task, contextual, and proactive performance. Like-
wise, we propose that predictive efficacy will improve further if one also con-
siders a broader criterion of withdrawal, combining absenteeism, CWBs and
turnover. Extending prior research showing that conscientious employees are
less likely to withdraw, to be late, to engage in CWBs, or to quit their jobs
(Berry et al., 2007; Zimmerman, 2008), in this review we examine for the
first time the relationship with all of these criteria concurrently.
To do so, we use new and existing meta-analytic data to clarify the conse-
quences of personality, which is carefully matched with outcomes on both
bandwidth and specificity. This allows us to establish the importance of com-
patibility in aggregation with such broad personality traits, after controlling for
artifactual variance across organizations and samples. It also makes it possible
to examine whether the strength in the true-score correlations of these compre-
hensive personality measures is more substantial than heretofore realized. In
short, we propose that the FFM traits will have higher predictive validities
when matched to two distinct kinds of work outcomes that are, for the first
time, equally broad representative indicators of a worker’s effectiveness at
work, based on the worker’s performance and withdrawal behaviors exhibited
while on the job (Campbell, 1990).
Work Effectiveness: Aggregated Work Performance and Withdrawal

Work performance. Work performance refers to a combination of tasks
and activities performed by employees over time. Thus, it is neither evaluated
based on a single behavior nor based on a single instance. Instead, it is the sum
of evaluations of employees’ contributions to discriminable elements or tasks.
That is, work performance is typically assessed over long periods, generally
reflecting an employee’s contributions over a year. Such evaluations reflect

broad archetypical effectiveness criteria (Nagle, 1953; Schmidt & Kaplan,
1971; Viswesvaran, Schmidt, & Ones, 2005). Scholars have indeed systemati-
cally expanded the performance criterion space to include task performance,
citizenship or contextual performance, and proactive performance (Bindl &
Parker, 2010; Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Grant & Parker, 2009; Harrison
et al., 2006; Organ, Podsakoff, & Podsakoff, 2010; Parker & Collins, 2010).
Research addressing the dimensionality of job behavior highlights an impor-
tant issue: in addition to unique job-related behaviors, there are similar cat-
egories of behaviors that span across jobs (Harrison et al., 2006; Rotundo &
Sackett, 2002). Recognizing that the value of work outcomes can be very
broadly defined, next we outline the components of the work effectiveness
outcome used in this study.
As illustrated in Figure 2, to construe work performance as broadly as the
FFM, we argue performance consists of task performance, contextual perform-
ance, and proactive performance. Task performance reflects job-specific per-
formance and generic forms of task proficiency or technical requirements.
These evaluations focus on the core task responsibilities directly responsible
for producing the output valued by the organization (Borman & Motowidlo,
1997): assembling a car (GM), delivering a package (FedEx), or completing
an audit (KPMG). Task performance captures how well people do all of the
core task elements of their work that exists for a particular purpose (i.e. their
job) and is structured in a way that leads to attainment of the goals for
which they are held responsible.
For the past two decades, organizational scholars have also acknowledged
that, in addition to task performance, contextual performance represents an
important dimension of overall employee job performance (Borman & Moto-
widlo, 1997; Organ et al., 2010). Contextual performance reflects discretionary
behaviors that help support task performance or contribute in aggregate to
organizational goals (Borman & Motowidlo, 1997; Motowidlo, 2003;
Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000; Organ & Ryan, 1995).
Referred to as contextual performance (Motowidlo, 2003) or citizenship
(Organ & Ryan, 1995; Organ et al., 2006) these behaviors represent perform-
ance that is conceptually aggregated to relatively high levels of abstraction
and contributes to the social and psychological core of the organization or
unit (Rotundo & Sackett, 2002). Because of its different focus, contextual per-
formance can be distinguished from task performance (Johnson, 2001).
Another related performance dimension has arisen due to the rapid rate of
change at work emerging from transformative, technological, economic, and
social forces (Bindl & Parker, 2010; Grant & Parker, 2009; Parker & Collins,
2010; Van Dyne, Cummings, & McLean Parks, 1995). This criterion captures,
through a proactive stance, how employees change the characteristics of their
job and work situation in response to constantly changing work demands
through behaviors such as adaptability, individual initiative, taking charge,

or providing ideas for improvement (Morrison & Phelps, 1999; Van Dyne &
LePine, 1998). We depict these increasingly important employee behaviors
as proactive performance, behaviors considered improvement-directed,
future-focused, and aimed at constructive changes (Bindl & Parker, 2010;
Grant & Ashford, 2008). Overall, these three dimensions comprehensively
capture current conceptualizations of the aggregate expected value of the
employee’s performance behaviors by including, in addition to a focus on
task performance, two other essential parts capturing employee roles as a
“good soldier” and “good change agent”.
Employee withdrawal. Work withdrawal provides another broad domain

of individual effectiveness and depicts various forms of detachment from work,
ranging from showing up late, if at all (absenteeism) to turnover from the
organization (Hulin, 1991; Hulin, Roznowski, & Hachiya, 1985). To illustrate
withdrawal as a distinct construct from performance (Griffeth, Hom, & Gaert-
ner, 2000), it is critical for organizations to not only employ high performing
individuals, but also high performing individuals who stay. Importantly, to
predict withdrawal behaviors using personality, the behavior must be initiated
at the discretion of the employee. Voluntary absenteeism or turnover is inten-
tional, and represents instances when the employee chooses to skip work or
leave the organization (Hulin, 1991). Clearly, this form of withdrawal directly
represents ineffective behavior, as the employee chooses not to contribute to
organizational goals. In contrast, involuntary turnover is initiated by the
employer (termination, reduction in force) and would not be predicted by
the employee’s attributes. Thus, in this review we focus on voluntary withdra-
wal behavior rather than involuntary withdrawal. Prior research has indicated
that personality traits, particularly the “functional employee” traits of conscien-
tiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness (Mount & Barrick, 1995) are
associated with less employee withdrawal (Zimmerman, 2008).
To these, we add CWBs (Sackett & DeVore, 2001; Spector & Fox, 2005), a
diverse set of behaviors and outcomes that detract from the contributions of
the employee to the organization or other employees (Sackett, 2002), disrupt
task execution, can be antisocial or diverge from organizationally desired beha-
viors. Researchers originally conceptualized counterproductive behavior as
merely the opposite pole of contextual performance (Sackett & Lievens,
2008). However, recent empirical research reveals that counterproductive be-
havior is separate from contextual performance when examined in the aggre-
gate (Berry et al., 2007; Dalal, 2005; Viswesvaran & Ones, 2005).
Counterproductive behaviors are aimed toward other employees or the organ-
ization itself and include lateness, rule-breaking, unruliness, theft, violence,
drug misuse on the job, and sabotage. Researchers recently realized such nega-
tive and destructive behaviors represent another form of withdrawal (Bennett
& Robinson, 2000; Rotundo & Sackett, 2002; Sackett, 2002).

To ensure the two-factor model of employee effectiveness shown in Figure 2
is broad and comprehensive enough, we also examine the predictive validity of
the FFM with one consolidated overarching work effectiveness outcome. A
summary construct based on both factors (work performance and withdra-
wal)— labeled employee effectiveness—will include quite different types of be-
havior collectively aggregated to the highest level to provide a comprehensive
view of the individual’s contributions to organizational goals. Such an inclusive
measure (i.e. employee effectiveness) would universally embody the value of
attaining core job requirements, exhibiting behaviors that adapt to or
support these core task requirements while remaining engaged with work
over time.
Aggregated Personality
The list of constructs depicting various personality traits depends on the level
of trait generality (McAdams, 1995; McAdams & Emmons, 1995) ranging from
a few very broad traits, to numerous relatively specific characteristics “situated
in time, place, and role” (McAdams, 1995, p. 379). Based on the theoretical
arguments reviewed thus far (Ajzen, 1991; Hogan & Roberts, 1996; Ones &
Viswesvaran, 1996; Schneider, Hough, & Dunnette, 1996), the broad employee
effectiveness criteria just described will best be predicted by correspondingly
general, highly aggregated predictors. The principle of aggregation has
shown that personality, by its very nature, can be aggregated up to a small
number of basic dimensions. As previously reviewed, the FFM is the most
widely accepted set of such highly aggregated measures in the field (Barrick
& Mount, 2005; Goldberg, 1993). The existence of the five broad factors has
been reported by several independent sets of researchers (Digman, 1990).
The universality of this structure has also been shown by replicating the
same FFM traits across seven basic language families that comprehensively
represent the native languages of most of the inhabitants of the world (McCrae
& Costa, 1997). We note that, considering our compatibility principle-based
arguments, a more pointed focus on FFM facets would be too narrow, and
thus inconsistent with the theory. Conversely, a broader focus on a smaller
number of factors (Digman, 1997) would be inconsistent with the current evi-
dence supporting a FFM structure (Ashton et al., 2009; McCrae et al., 2008).
Several important points provide support that such broad and comprehen-
sive personality traits have substantial utility. First, even correlations of .25 can
be important if the cumulative effects from the prediction are obtained across
an employee’s whole career (Abelson, 1985; Judge et al., 1999). Personality
stabilizes in early adulthood and remains comparatively consistent over time
(Conley, 1985; Costa & McCrae, 1994; McCrae & Costa, 1994; Roberts,
Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006; Terracciano, Costa, & McCrae, 2006); conse-
quently, an effect of .25 on performance and withdrawal may be obtained

day-after-day, year-after-year. Cumulating the effects of personality on an
employee’s behavior over one’s entire career can be consequential for organiz-
ations (Judge et al., 1999) even if the magnitude of the correlation appears
modest.
Second, recent research on job design (Humphrey et al., 2007; Zimmerman,
2008) reveals that the effects of personality traits are at least as strong as the
effects obtained from distal motivational effects of the situation. Scholars
have long-advocated for the pre-eminence of the predictive utility of the situ-
ation (Davis-Blake & Pfeffer, 1989); yet recent meta-analytic results reveal true-
score correlations of only .10– .23 (Humphrey et al., 2007; Zimmerman, 2008)
across job design attributes when predicting job performance and withdrawal.
Importantly, such empirical findings illustrate that the .30 barrier applies to
both person and situation predictors of human behavior. An additional
point is that interventions (e.g. the use of incentive pay, recognition, goal
setting, training, supervision, and even leadership) that organizations use to
simultaneously reward employees to increase performance and decrease with-
drawal can be limited in number and consume resources. Thus, being able to
predict nearly 10% of the variance by assessing just one construct is practically
and theoretically significant. In sum, what appear to be modest effect sizes can
have a much larger impact than one might expect, after considering all of the
other organizational attempts to impact employee effectiveness.
Third, the practical significance of a predictor depends on more than just
the magnitude of its correlation with an outcome. Stated differently, the
nature of the outcome itself matters as well. To predict how successful and per-
sistent an employee is on task, contextual, and adaptive behaviors over an
entire year at work would appear to be a significant accomplishment, certainly
more so than predicting whether an employee shows up on time for a meeting
next Friday. Hence, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, it is criti-
cal to consider what is being predicted.
In this review, we contend researchers have failed to recognize the impli-

cations of the full breadth of the FFM personality model because they have
tried to predict more specific facets of performance (Oswald & Hough, 2011).
For the first time, we argue that each of the FFM personality traits is sufficiently
broad as a predictor, one that comprehensively assesses an individual’s habitual
ways of thinking, feeling, and doing over situations and times. To fully realize the
variety of information contained in such global FFM trait-based predictions, we
must examine an equally broad, comprehensive criterion. Thus, application of
the compatibility principle (Ajzen, 1988; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1974; Harrison
et al., 2006) led us to empirically examine the proposition that these superordi-
nate personality traits will predict equally aggregated, overall employee effective-
ness criteria better than more specific dimensions of work effectiveness
frequently used in current research (e.g. task performance). Thus, we anticipate
the practical significance of these predictors to be even more important than we

have previously realized. Specifically, our results should reveal that the FFM pre-
dicts and explains substantially better when matched with very broad and com-
prehensive performance and withdrawal factors, disconfirming the theory that
better prediction of behavior can only occur with the more numerous facets or
primary level traits (Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001).
Quantitative Review Process

To test the proposed model (Figure 2), we utilized meta-analytic structural
equation modeling (Viswesvaran & Ones, 1995) based on a meta-analytic
matrix of relationships among FFM traits, and employee effectiveness criteria.
Meta-analytic estimates needed for this review were obtained from two
sources. These include both (a) previously published meta-analyses and (b)
several original meta-analyses conducted for this review (when effect sizes
from prior meta-analyses were unavailable). We searched the literature using
keywords such as FFM, Big Five, conscientiousness, emotional stability, neuroti-
cism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, combined with search
terms related to behavioral criteria (e.g. contextual performance, OCB, helping,
adaptive performance, and CWB). We searched in multiple research databases,
including Business Source Complete (EBSCO), PsycINFO (1887 – 2010), and
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses databases.
To obtain a complete meta-analytic correlation matrix required 55 effect
sizes. Prior meta-analytic estimates were obtained for 45 of these effect sizes
(Barrick et al., 2001; Berry et al., 2007; Bycio, 1992; Chiaburu et al., 2011;
Dalal, 2005; Griffeth et al., 2000; Koslowsky, Sagie, Krausz, & Singer, 1997;
Mitra, Jenkins, & Gupta, 1992; Ones, Viswesvaran, & Reiss, 1996; Podsakoff
et al., 2009; Zimmerman, 2008).1 After an extensive search for existing meta-
analyses, 10 new meta-analyses were still required. These new meta-analytic
estimates are presented in Appendix 2.
Measures. On the predictor side, FFM personality traits are broad, well-
accepted measures of dispositional individual differences. We followed the
definitions used by Barrick et al. (2001) for personality. Concerning our cri-
teria, we operationalized contextual performance as employee behaviors not
formally part of the job yet involving helping and cooperating with others in
the organization to get tasks done (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993, 1997;
Organ et al., 2006). Thus, we included published meta-analyses and primary
studies, including behaviors such as altruism, conscientiousness (a dimension
of citizenship behavior, not a trait), citizenship, contextual performance, civic
virtue, general compliance, and sportsmanship (Podsakoff et al., 2000). For
proactive performance, typical behaviors included employee adaptability, crea-
tive performance, innovative behavior, personal initiative, proactive behaviors,
speaking up, and taking charge (Chiaburu, Lorinkova, & Van Dyne, 2013;
Grant & Ashford, 2008; Parker & Collins, 2010). For withdrawal behaviors,
consistent with existing definitions and operationalizations of CWB, we
included existing meta-analyses and primary studies that contain behaviors
such as CWBs, employee deviance, dysfunctional behavior, noncompliant be-
havior, and retaliation (Cullen & Sackett, 2003; Robinson & Bennett, 1995;
Sackett & DeVore, 2001). Thus, each of these criteria can be seen to be very
broad in coverage, just like the FFM.
Analytic strategy and model comparisons. Combining the newly generated

meta-analytic estimates with existing estimates obtained from published meta-
analyses, we constructed the meta-analytic correlation matrix shown in
Appendix 1. This enabled us to examine the predictive validity of personality
traits on higher-order behavioral criteria using meta-analytic structural
equation modeling (Viswesvaran & Ones, 1995). Although published meta-
analyses showed the bivariate correlations between the predictors and the be-
havioral criteria, our approach has an important advantage: it has the capability
to test complex aggregated models. This has not been done in either single
primary studies or in previously published stand-alone meta-analyses. We
compared a series of theoretically competing models to determine the best
fit model that represents a close approximation to true structural relationships
between the FFM traits and higher-order behavioral criteria in the population
(Harrison et al., 2006; Hu & Bentler, 1999). Building on the best fit model
identified, we examine the validity of FFM on aggregated outcomes and
compare the effects of FFM on different behavioral criteria.
The core of our argument is that the validity of the FFM traits on work
effectiveness is maximized when the breadth of the criterion matches the
breadth of the broad, general predictors assessed by the FFM. As revealed by
our empirical tests using structural equation modeling, our a priori specified
model (Figure 2), consisting of two separate criteria, in which task, contextual,
and proactive performance represent a higher-order performance construct, and
CWB, absenteeism, and turnover represent a higher-order withdrawal con-

struct, displayed superior model fit (x2 ¼ 763.5, df ¼ 24, goodness of fit
index (GFI) ¼ .96, comparative fit index (CFI) ¼ .89, standardized root
mean square residual (SRMR) ¼ .05) than other models (including a six
factor model where all criteria were independent, a one factor model where
all outcomes formed one dimension, and several in between conceptually
plausible models).2 All the factor loadings of behavior indicators on two
higher-order latent constructs were significant and ranged from .31 (absentee-
ism) to .83 (task performance). The average value of factor loading was .58. Our
results indicate that the hypothesized model represents a close approximation
to the true structural relationships between the FFM traits and higher-order be-
havioral criteria in the population.
The predictive validity of the FFM traits on employee effectiveness. We

posited that the validity of the FFM traits on aggregated outcomes will increase
substantially compared to previous meta-analyses focusing on narrower per-
formance outcomes (e.g. task performance and turnover). To be comparable
to previous meta-analyses, which estimated bivariate correlations between per-
sonality and performance, we examined the independent effect of each FFM
trait on aggregated employee work performance and withdrawal behavior
and reported the standardized structural path, which can be interpreted as a
correlation between latent constructs (Harrison et al., 2006). Table 1 presents
standardized path coefficients of the relationships between the FFM predictors
and these two criteria. Specifically, predictive validities for the aggregated per-
formance (task, contextual, and proactive) and withdrawal behaviors (absen-
teeism, CWB, and turnover) are reported in columns 1 and 4, respectively.
These validities are contrasted with prior validities reported using overall job
performance and counterproductive behaviors in columns 2 and 5, respect-
ively. Evidence that the FFM predicts the aggregated criteria better than specific
performance dimensions is reported in columns 3 and 6.
Concerning the aggregated work performance criterion, conscientiousness
had a moderate relationship with employee performance (g ¼ .28), and
explained 8% variance in this outcome. The other four predictors had smaller
effects on work performance (emotional stability, g ¼ .15; agreeableness, g ¼
.11; extraversion, g ¼ .14; and openness, g ¼ .11). To examine whether there
were significant gains in prediction after aggregating the criteria, we compared
our results with meta-analytic estimates from Barrick et al. (2001) for overall job
performance, reported in column 2. The gains in predictive validity of the FFM
traits on aggregated work performance increases by 10% to 120% (see column 3,
Table 1). In every case, predictive validity was greater when broad work per-
formance criteria were matched in breadth to the FFM.
Concerning withdrawal behavior, conscientiousness had a relatively strong
relationship with employee withdrawal (g ¼ 2.41), explaining a significant
374 †
The Academy of Management Annals
Table 1 Comparison of Validities of FFM Personality Traits for Aggregate Work Effectiveness Criteria
Work performance Withdrawal behavior
Current Barrick et al. Validity increasec Current Berry et al. Validity increasec
studya (2001)b (%) studya (2007)b (%)
Conscientiousness .28(.08) .23 22 2.41(.17) 2.30 37
Emotional stability .15(.02) .12 25 2.32(.10) 2.23 39
Agreeableness .11(.01) .10 10 2.51(.26) 2.33 55
Extraversion .14(.02) .12 17 2.00(.00) 2.03 0
Openness .11(.01) .05 120 2.06(.00) 2.06 0
Notes: aCoefficients were standardized, estimated by meta-analytic structure equation modeling. To be comparable to previous meta-analyses which typically reported
correlations between predictors and outcomes, we estimated the independent effect of each personality trait on two latent outcomes (i.e. work performance and
withdrawal behavior) and reported the standardized structural paths (Harrison et al., 2006). All five models (i.e. including each of five personality traits) displayed
acceptable model fit: GFI ranged from .96 to .98, CFI ranged from .91 to .96, and SRMR ranged from .03 to .05. R2 values are reported in parentheses.
b
Coefficients were taken from previous meta-analyses as reference points for comparison.
c
The percentage of increase in validity from columns a to b.
amount of variance in the outcome (R2 ¼ .17). Emotional stability was also a
moderately strong predictor of withdrawal behavior (g ¼ 2.32, R2 ¼ .10).
Interestingly, agreeableness was the strongest predictor of the withdrawal
factor (g ¼ 2.51), explaining a significant 26% of the variance. Conversely,
extraversion and openness had negligible effects on withdrawal behavior
(g ¼ 2.00 and g ¼ 2.06, respectively). We also compared our results with
a recent meta-analysis examining the effects of the FFM on CWB (a narrow
aspect of withdrawal behavior, as shown in column 5). These findings were
used because in prior meta-analyses (Ones et al., 2007), FFM traits predicted
CWB better than the other narrow withdrawal dimensions. As shown in
column 6 of Table 1, the results from this comparison suggest that the validity
of the three relevant FFM traits on aggregated withdrawal behavior are larger
by 37 – 55%.
The evidence presented in Table 1 supports the prediction advanced in

this review and reveal significantly better prediction occurs when two
broad work effectiveness criteria are chosen and does so better than any
specific measure of performance or withdrawal (Barrick et al., 2001; Hum-
phrey et al., 2007; One et al., 2007). The sizes of these relationships, particu-
larly with withdrawal behavior, are also meaningfully larger than reported
previously whether using personality or situational predictors (here r ¼
2.51). Such validities are significant in part because, for the first time, we
see substantially larger correlations than the .30 “barrier” that prior meta-ana-
lyses have failed to breach.
To demonstrate personality is useful for predicting aggregated criteria
matched to the FFM’s generality, we also report multiple validity coefficients
for the FFM as a set. In Figure 3, we compare the multiple correlations
when predicting specific dimensions of job-related criteria against the aggre-
gated work criterion. The Rs reported in Figure 3 represent the best, meta-
analytically derived, prediction estimates. As shown, for the performance
criteria, the general, aggregated work performance criterion is only marginally
Figure 3 Meta-Analytic Multiple Validity Coefficients of the Five-Factor Personality Traits

Predicting Specific and General (Aggregated) Work Effectiveness criteria.
Note: Gray bars represent specific criteria, dark bars represent general (aggregated) criteria.
larger than for contextual performance alone (R ¼ .32 versus .31, respectively).
However, for the withdrawal criterion, the set of FFM predictors had a substan-
tially larger impact on the aggregated withdrawal measure over the next largest
specific withdrawal criterion (i.e. CWB) as R increases by .25: from .41 to .66.
In short, a multiple validity coefficient of .66 is meaningful, particularly since
basing these estimates on meta-analytic intercorrelations largely circumvents
capitalization on chance.
Review Summary and Discussion

This overview of prior reviews comprehensively summarizes the predictive
relationships (or best practices) found with various work outcomes and also
advances theoretical explanation by establishing the mediators and moderators
researchers have proposed of these personality – performance relationships (as

presented in Figure 1). Specifically, we integrated major theories in the person-
ality literature to gain a better understanding of how, why, and when person-
ality predicts important work outcomes. In addition to providing a synthesis of
existing research and theories, we went one step further to develop and test a
new perspective on the predictive power of personality, based on the compat-
ibility principle, and revealed that the predictive validities of a few broad, global
traits which correspond to the widely accepted FFM personality model, can
only be optimally examined and understood when predicting an equally
broad, general effectiveness outcome, consisting of work performance and
work withdrawal, as presented in Figure 2.
One primary purpose of this review was to demonstrate that broad person-
ality traits could explain more than 5– 10% of the variance in work effective-
ness (Morgeson et al., 2007; Oswald & Hough, 2011). Specifically, drawing
on the compatibility principle (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Harrison et al.,
2006) we posited that prior research studies significantly underestimates the
predictive validity of personality when using the broad, comprehensive FFM
traits as predictors, because researchers have failed to match the breadth of
these traits to equally broad, comprehensive criteria. Using structural equation
analyses of meta-analytically determined relationships, our review substanti-
ates the advantage of conceptualizing employee effectiveness as a broad set
of behaviors. Indeed, the FFM personality traits, as a set, predict nearly 40%
of the variance in the withdrawal criterion. The magnitude of these effects
far exceeds those previously found in meta-analytic work using either person-
ality or job design predictors (Barrick et al., 2001; Humphrey et al., 2007) when
predicting specific performance or withdrawal behaviors. Thus, when one
needs to know whether an individual is effective across a large number of criti-
cal outcomes, these results demonstrate the FFM traits are uniquely able to
accurately predict such a large set of valuable outcomes—explaining nearly
40% of the variance—not just 5 –10%.
The import of these findings are hard to overstate, as they reveal that an
employee’s general tendency to make valuable contributions to an organization
can parsimoniously be predicted by his or her personality traits. As noted by
researchers “on the person side of the equation, traits are often considered
broad constructs because they entail the aggregation of one’s thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors across many situations” (Roberts, 2006, p. 12, italics added). Thus
when employees’ work behaviors are aggregated to a similar level, they can be
forecasted by the broad FFM personality traits better than we heretofore have
realized. This does not mean that narrow personality traits do not have utility;
we agree with the consensus, that to predict specific criteria, one must rely on
narrower traits than the FFM. Nevertheless, when talking about very broad indi-
cators of success at work, the FFM predict better than we have recognized.
Implications for Theories, Practices, and Future Research

Building on the compatibility principle, we demonstrated the advantage of
relying on a few broad, global traits in the form of the widely accepted FFM
of personality when predicting two equally broad, general effectiveness out-
comes—work performance and work withdrawal. Originally, Fishbein and
Ajzen (1974) proposed that broad attitudes (i.e. overall job satisfaction)
would predict equally broad behavioral outcomes. Extending this principle,
we applied it to the personality domain. Specifically, we argued that global per-
sonality traits reflecting an employee’s habitual behavioral tendencies across
situations are more valuable in predicting aggregate behavioral criteria than
predicting more limited representations of behavior. Consequently, the evi-
dence revealed several new conclusions regarding the validity of personality
when assessed through the FFM.
First, our review extends previous findings on conscientiousness as a power-
ful predictor of broadly defined performance and withdrawal behaviors, with
gains in prediction ranging from 22% to 37%. While this finding is very
much in line with the existing cumulative findings substantiating the role of
conscientiousness in predicting work performance, it also extends it, by provid-
ing a more accurate prediction and increasing its validity. Second, our results
reveal emotional stability and agreeableness had important unique effects on
the broad withdrawal construct, which should cast the efficacy of these traits
in a new light. Specifically, emotional stability has historically been considered
an important predictor of job performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Connelly
& Ones, 2010; Le et al., 2011). However, when considering its unique effects
above and beyond the other FFM personality traits, it actually appears to be
a much better predictor of withdrawal. This is not entirely surprising when
considering researchers’ suggestions and empirical evidence that (lack of)
emotional stability may consist not only of anxiety, negative affectivity and
harm avoidance, but also of withdrawal and alienation (DeYoung, Quilty, &
Peterson, 2007; Widiger, 2009) and that “neuroticism is clearly a very robust
predictor of negative life outcomes” (Widiger, 2009, p. 136). Our review estab-
lishes that it also plays an important role in employee withdrawal.
Agreeableness, on the other hand, has often been overlooked as a worth-
while predictor of work-related outcomes (with the possible exceptions of
teamwork and customer service [Barrick et al., 2001]). Our results indicate
that when predicting withdrawal behaviors, agreeableness is the most impor-
tant predictor of employee withdrawal. Specifically, agreeableness had the
strongest unique effect out of all of the FFM personality traits on withdrawal
behaviors. Similar to the strength of general mental ability (GMA, or “g”,
Schmidt & Hunter, 1998) in predicting work performance, agreeableness by
itself explained over 25% of the variance in employee withdrawal. To coin a
phrase, agreeableness is the “g” of withdrawal predictors. In sum, the evidence
presented in this study reveals the triad reflecting “functional personality”

(Mount & Barrick, 1995, p. 176)—consisting of conscientiousness, emotional
stability, and agreeableness—is even more critical than previously recognized
for the explanation of employee effectiveness, particularly withdrawal behav-
ior. Our findings are consistent with researchers’ position that these three
are actually socially desirable (Digman, 1997) and capture well social interest
(Adler, 1939) and communion (Bakan, 1966). Due to this social orientation,
employees are better embedded in the work social environment, through pres-
ence (low absenteeism), lack of dysfunctional behaviors, and desire to remain
with the organization.
A third significant finding is that, in all cases, the gain in prediction through
multiple correlation explained in all of these meta-analytic path analyses
exceeded the .30 barrier put forth by Mischel (1968). For example, the
effects of agreeableness on the narrow withdrawal components were 2.33,
2.06, and 2.27. However, the effect on the broad withdrawal factor increased
substantially (2.51), supporting the utility of using aggregated outcomes.
Theoretically, this is because the broad withdrawal factor indicates a latent con-
struct that captures meaningful employee withdrawal behaviors across a wide
variety of situations. To explain nearly 40% of the variance in aggregated with-
drawal with five personality traits is certainly impressive, and can lead to
significant reductions in withdrawal from most organizations. By using
meta-analytic estimates, the relationships among the predictors and perform-
ance criteria established in this study should be widely generalizable.
Fourth, our review should inform future research on conceptualizing work
effectiveness (Campbell, 1990). There has been considerable controversy
regarding how the separate evaluations of employee effectiveness should be
combined (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000). Over the past 20 years, the individual
criterion space has steadily been broadened to include more performance
dimensions (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Campbell, 1990; Harrison &
Martocchio, 1998; Organ et al., 2010; Parker & Collins, 2010; Rotundo &
Sackett, 2002). At the same time, researchers have examined the higher-order
structure of effectiveness and found evidence for a positive manifold among
these dimensions (Harrison et al., 2006; Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000), and
that the shared variance is not solely attributed to halo error (Viswesvaran,
1993). With respect to dimensionality, our results provide compelling evidence
that there is substantial overlap among related facets of employee effectiveness
and this commonality across criteria best fit a model accounting for two
higher-order dimensions of employee effectiveness. In the present view, all
of the constituent pieces of employee effectiveness can be explained by two dis-
tinct factors: an overall index of work performance (comprised task, contex-
tual, and proactive performance) and another explaining withdrawal
behavior (including absenteeism, turnover, and counterproductive workplace
behavior).
The finding that various work behaviors can be organized by two broad
effectiveness factors can be explained by many theories of personality we
reviewed earlier. Specifically, different types of behaviors are often driven by
unique motives derived from personality factors. According to socioanalytic
and other related theories (Barrick et al., 2002; Hogan & Holland, 2003), indi-
viduals actively strive to fulfill two broad goals, which may be aligned with the
two broad effectiveness factors. In particular, the withdrawal factor, which
reflects the extent to which individuals are willing (or not) to get along with
others or be cooperative in the organization, is strongly driven by personality
traits with a communion striving and social orientation (Adler, 1939; Bakan,
1966; Digman, 1997). As a result, it is important to note that these two
higher-order criteria are associated with distinct dispositional predictors.
Agreeableness and emotional stability had sizeable effects on employee with-
drawal, but barely predicted overall work performance. Only conscientiousness
was found to be a useful predictor of both criteria, and conscientiousness pre-
dicted work performance (.28) almost two times better than any of the remain-
ing four factors (e.g. emotional stability, .15). Such findings underscore why
conscientiousness is thought to be a critical universal predictor at work
(Barrick et al., 2001). These distinct patterns further suggest the importance
of considering the predictive validity of both higher-order factors as these
two aspects of employee overall effectiveness parsimoniously and comprehen-
sively captures numerous distinct employee behaviors at work.
Relatedly, the focus on behavior arising from within the person as the
genesis of the effectiveness factors highlights the flexibility with which the
model can be revised. For example, one assumption underlying our model is
a view of CWB presented as unitary and thus predominantly having withdra-
wal characteristics. Future research may reveal interpersonal aspects of CWB
(e.g. aggression, incivility, and sexual harassment) better reflect behavior
linked to the performance criterion, while other behaviors (theft, accidents,
and lateness) remain meaningfully associated with withdrawal. While
disentangling them was not possible here in our meta-analysis, we encourage

future research to address this and other related issues. An advantage not
readily apparent in our framework lies within its potential portability
beyond the FFM on which we based our predictions. Research based on
within-person traits or trait syndromes (e.g. goal orientation; Payne et al.,
2007; proactive personality; Tornau & Frese, 2013) can be informed and
benefit from our integrative view.
Sixth, even though we noted the stability of personality traits, such stability
should not be interpreted as immutability. As demonstrated in Roberts’
research, role demands can facilitate predictable personality changes
(Roberts, 2006; Wood & Roberts, 2006). Such mean-level shifts in personality
traits correspond to life transitions (e.g. people becoming higher in Openness
around when they start college, higher in Conscientiousness when entering the
workforce, and higher in the dominance side of Extraversion as they enter the
age of promotions and parenting). Similar influences can operate in work set-
tings, and future research should consider the influence of—and interplay
among—personality traits and specific tasks, roles, or job situations. Such
changes could be both beneficial and detrimental, with employees assigned
to a more complex job increasing their level of Openness, while decreasing it
in employees in routine suffused environments. An important consideration
here, in addition to the person by situation interplay is establishing the
amount of structural change necessary to generate a positive change.
Seventh, in keeping with our emphasis on aggregation, we also recommend
aggregation from a measurement perspective. Recent work (Oh et al., 2011;
Zimmerman et al., 2010) has highlighted the importance of measuring an indi-
vidual’s personality not by just the focal person’s perspective, but by also
obtaining multiple observer-ratings of that individual’s personality. From a
psychometric perspective (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994), this will increase the
reliability of the personality ratings; from a theoretical perspective (Hogan,
1996), this will capture important construct space that would otherwise have
been omitted as self-ratings are based on self-presentation styles, whereas
observer-ratings are based on the focal individual’s reputation founded on
past behavior. On the criterion side, there has long been consensus about
increasing the number of evaluators of an employee’s job performance as
additional raters will increase the reliability of the ratings (Nunnally & Bern-
stein, 1994). Furthermore, while there is some debate as to the unique criterion
space tapped by multiple rater perspectives, there has been research support
that, for at least certain types of ratings, different perspectives may provide
additional substantive information about an employee’s level of performance
(Kammeyer-Mueller, Steel, & Rubenstein, 2010; Murphy & DeShon, 2000;
Viswesvaran, Schmidt, & Ones, 2002).
Finally, our review has implications for the role of the situation in the per-
sonality – behavior relationship. Prior theory has proposed that specific
personality traits will only affect behavior when the thoughts and actions
engendered by the trait match the demands and rewards from the specific
social and task demands inherent in the job (Barrick et al., 2003; Dawis & Lof-
quist, 1984; Endler & Magnusson, 1976; Hogan & Holland, 2003; Tett &
Burnett, 2003). From this perspective, the situation provides trait-relevant
cues that encourage individuals to express their tendencies and determines
whether activation of the individual’s personality facilitates or inhibits
employee effectiveness. The principle of aggregation, however, posits that the
general behavioral tendencies that comprise overall employee effectiveness
span across the in- and extra-role frontier. Thus, reliance on such broad effec-
tiveness indices or behavioral tendencies subsumes the variability originating
across numerous situational constraints across jobs and organizations,
thereby clarifying the underlying relationship between one’s behavioral ten-
dencies. As revealed here, personality matters whether one is attempting to

understand behaviors linked to performance or retention at work. Conse-
quently, personality is a core construct for HR and OB researchers.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Brad Kirkman, In-Sue Oh, and Philip Roth for
their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Funding
This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China
(No. 71302012).
Endnotes
1. The sources for existing meta-analyses used to complete our correlation matrix
with effect sizes are provided as a note to our Appendix 1.
2. Detailed information of the model comparisons is available upon request.
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Appendix 1 Meta-Analytic Correlations between the FFM and Job-Related Behaviora
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1. Conscientiousness
k
N
2. Emotional stability .26b
k 26
N 5380
3. Agreeableness .27b .25b
k 344 18
N 162,975 3690
4. Extraversion .00b .19b .17b
Retaining the Productive Employee

k 632 60 243
N 683,001 10,926 135,529
5. Openness 2.06b .16b .11b .17b
k 338 21 236 418
N 356,680 4870 144,205 135,529
6. Task performance .23c .12c .10c .12c .05c
k 239 224 206 222 143
N 48,100 38,817 36,210 39,432 23,225
7. Contextual performance .20d .14d .19d .06d .20d .54e
k 24 12 17 11 9 23
N 5186 2606 5103 2573 1680 6983
8. Proactive performance .10d .08d 2.03d .13d .14d .35f .57d
k 17 7 8 6 19 28 27
†
N 2629 1732 1396 1144 3761 7430 5186
393
394
Appendix 1 (Continued)
†
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
The Academy of Management Annals

9. CWB 2.30h 2.23h 2.33h 2.03h 2.06h 2.45i 2.32j 2.23i
k 8 7 8 5 5 16 49 15
N 2934 2309 2934 1836 1804 3916 16,721 8835
10. Absenteeism 2.16i 2.11i 2.06i .08i 2.04i 2.29k 2.16f .02i .39i
k 13 10 9 10 9 49 15 3 5
N 1582 1326 1076 1326 1076 15,764 4037 658 5385
11. Turnover 2.22l 2.20l 2.27l 2.04l .10l 2.17m 2.14f 2.08i .27n .33o
k 17 19 15 18 16 72 12 2 6 33
N 1631 1824 1532 1608 1563 25,234 3917 7689 4208 5316
a
If more than one meta-analysis reported on the same relationship, we used the estimate reflecting the largest observations. Harmonic mean N ¼ 3047. Superscripts in
the table indicate meta-analytic sources for correlations.
b
Ones et al. (1996).
c
Barrick et al. (2001).
d
Chiaburu et al. (2011).
e
Podsakoff et al. (2009).
f
Thomas et al. (2010)
h
Berry et al. (2007).
i
Original analyses (in bold), performed for this study, can be found in Appendix 2.
j
Dalal (2005).
k
Bycio (1992).
l
Zimmerman (2008).
m
Griffeth et al. (2000).
n
Koslowsky et al. (1997).
o
Mitra et al. (1992).
View publication stats
Appendix 2 Results of New Meta-Analyses for Absenteeism, Counterproductive Work Behavior, and Proactive Performance
k N rc SDr r SDr %Var CVLL CVUL CILL CIUL

Absenteeism
Conscientiousness 13 1582 2.13 .11 2.16 .08 66 2.27 2.06 2.24 2.09
Agreeableness 9 1076 2.05 .08 2.06 .00 100 2.06 2.06 2.12 .00
Emotional Stability 10 1326 2.09 .08 2.11 .00 100 2.11 2.11 2.17 2.05
Extraversion 10 1326 .07 .13 .08 .11 47 2.06 .23 2.02 .18
Openness 9 1076 2.03 .08 2.04 .00 100 2.04 2.04 2.10 .02
Retaining the Productive Employee

CWB
Task performance 16 3916 2.38 .17 2.45 .18 11 2.68 2.21 2.55 2.35
Proactive performance 15 8835 2.18 .15 2.23 .18 7 2.46 .00 2.33 2.13
Absenteeism 5 5385 .31 .15 .39 .19 4 .16 .63 .23 .56
Proactive performance
Turnover 2 7689 2.07 .01 2.08 .00 100 2.08 2.08 2.09 2.06
Absenteeism 3 658 .02 .06 .02 .00 100 .02 .02 2.07 .11
Notes: k, number of statistically independent samples; N, total sample size; rc, sample-size-weighted mean correlation; SDr, sample-size-weighted observed standard
deviation of correlations; r, mean true-score correlation corrected for unreliability and range restriction; SDr, standard deviation of corrected correlations; %Var,
percentage of variance attributable to statistical artifacts; CVLL and CVUL, lower and upper bounds, respectively, of the 80% credibility interval; CILL and CIUL, lower and
upper bounds, respectively, of the 95% confidence interval around the corrected mean correlation.
395 †

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reconceptualize the effect of the ﬁve-factor model (FFM) on broadly deﬁned

We begin with a short primer on the fundamental role of personality at

A Primer on Personality’s Effects on Behavior

traits, which reﬂect an individual’s enduring patterns of cognition, motivation,

al stability (calm, steady, and self-conﬁdent), extraversion (ambitious, sociable,

Morgeson, 2007) or job satisfaction itself when related to job performance

Theories of Personality as a Predictor of Work Performance and Withdrawal

Figure 1 Theoretical Frameworks for the Effects of Personality Traits.

OB. An integrative framework, including major theories and models of person-

strength or applicability to understand behavior. Through these traits, we

Motivational processes. Theoretically, differences in these personality

explain the self-regulatory processes guiding one’s actions. Although there

2002; Locke, 1991). More importantly, these effects on task-speciﬁc motiva-

Similarly, research evidence also suggests that individuals differ in likeli-

Affect and satisfaction. To fully understand how personality inﬂuences

in the relationship between personality and work behavior, Ilies, Fulmer,

Social relationships. The importance of social relationships to motivation

Theories of Personality and Mediation

tiousness, and emotional stability; a ß factor consisting of extraversion and

various employee work behaviors that would require different motives

Cognitive-motivational strivings. In addition to socioanalytic theory,

power, inﬂuence, and prestige within the organizational hierarchies (Bakan,

Theories of Personality and Boundary Conditions

Situational strength. Among theories of personality-situation interactions,

2001). Personality, like cognitive ability, is expected to be an even more inﬂu-

Trait activation theory. Another inﬂuential theory specifying the person-

focus on situation-trait relevance that certain traits and speciﬁc situations

Cognitive-affective personality system. Both situational strength and trait

culture and high-involvement work practices, personality has the potential to

A Primer on Aggregating Personality

Speciﬁcally, in the next section we develop a theoretical model based on the

phenomena, not ﬂeeting reactions to external stimuli or to organizational

The Role of the Compatibility Principle

this issue by developing a theoretical framework and brieﬂy summarizing

pm on Friday for a meeting). Known as the compatibility principle, and

Figure 2 Conceptual Framework for Connecting FFM with Employee Effectiveness.

work make it possible to further investigate how personality traits inﬂuence

As shown in Figure 2, we conceptualize work performance and employee

among job performance dimensions may cause multicollinearity and esti-

Work Effectiveness: Aggregated Work Performance and Withdrawal

reﬂecting an employee’s contributions over a year. Such evaluations reﬂect

through behaviors such as adaptability, individual initiative, taking charge,

Employee withdrawal. Work withdrawal provides another broad domain

& Robinson, 2000; Rotundo & Sackett, 2002; Sackett, 2002).

quently, an effect of .25 on performance and withdrawal may be obtained

In this review, we contend researchers have failed to recognize the impli-

the practical signiﬁcance of these predictors to be even more important than we

Quantitative Review Process

Analytic strategy and model comparisons. Combining the newly generated

CWB, absenteeism, and turnover represent a higher-order withdrawal con-

The predictive validity of the FFM traits on employee effectiveness. We

The evidence presented in Table 1 supports the prediction advanced in

Figure 3 Meta-Analytic Multiple Validity Coefficients of the Five-Factor Personality Traits