Personality similarities between people who share an employer are as strong as between those who share a nationality

Is bigger better when it comes to data? After all, a well-designed study can demonstrate powerful and meaningful effects even within a modestly sized sample. Still, if you get your hands on a large enough data set - and you know what you are doing - you can potentially get a lot out of it.

In our penultimate report from the DOP 2014 conference, Prof Dave Bartram - someone who certainly knows what they are doing - presented work from a data set clocking in at a formidable 92,561 job applicants. At a previous conference Bartram reported on how countries have more homogenous personalities: two British people will be slightly more similar than a Brit with another nationality.

Evidence suggests a similar thing happens with organisations, and Bartram's team was interested in using this mammoth data set, with individuals in 35 countries applying to 490 different organisations, to look at how these effects interact. Can we make a better guess to your personality based on the country you work in, or the organisation you work in? How much of the organisation effect is explained by the industry you work in? Are country and organisation effects distinct, or interrelated - perhaps through the industries that a country focuses on?

The personality measure used was the Occupational Personality Questionnaire, which takes a fairly fine-grained approach that reports across 32 personality traits. A multi-level modelling analysis showed that 12% of the personality variance was explained by country and organisational membership, each accounting for a similar proportion. With 88% of the variance unaccounted for, there is still a range of personality within any given organisation or country, but the commonality is definitely present. Industry effects, meanwhile, were very small: around 2%. So the specific organisation you are in or applying to says more about your personality than the broader industry does.

Follow-up analysis showed that these country/organisation effects varied from trait to trait. Some, such as persuasiveness, competitiveness, and appetite for busy work conditions, were highly sensitive to country and organisational membership, which explained up to 20% of their variance; other traits far less so.

The organisation and country effects didn't tend to turn up for the same traits, either: the correlation between the two was close to zero. Instead, each environmental factor tended to target different types of traits. For instance, traits related to extraversion and conscientiousness were up to four times more related to organisation, whereas those related to emotional stability were up to five times more related to country. This suggests that the aspects of personality that comprise a 'national culture' are generally distinct from those that translate to an organisational culture.

Research has shown that organisations can develop a typical personality type, often shaped by their founders, whose own personality traits directly influence how the organisation operates. This big dataset shows that organisations attract people who are as similar to each other as are national compatriots. The ways in which people cluster due to organisation is different from countries, focusing more on traits that relate to entepreneurial, creative, and communication styles that clearly differ from workplace to workplace. Personality is multifaceted, and those facets appear to have a different relevance for the different aspects of our environments.  This kind of large-sample research is one means for us to get a better understanding of how we are different, and how we are similar.

Perfectionism: The Good, The Bad, and The Way Beyond

Can perfectionism ever be useful? This was the question floated at the outset of an arresting keynote at the 2014 conference of the BPS's Division of Occupational Psychology. Paul Flaxman began by asking his audience to jot down helpful and hurtful features of perfectionism, and a show of hands demonstrated that many struggled to see a positive angle to it. They aren’t alone - many clinical specialists who study perfectionism share this view. But over the hour, Flaxman informed us about data that throws lights on the negative and positive facets of perfectionism, including his own research on perfectionism in the workplace.

Yes, there is evidence showing perfectionism to be associated with various negative outcomes. We've covered some of Flaxman's research before, in which people with perfectionist traits were found to recover from stress during vacations, but see that benefit dissipate quickly once they return to work. In general, perfectionism is also associated with weak productivity thanks to putting off completion of tasks or hitting walls in creative areas, and to personal frustrations.

However, evidence suggests that there are actually two kinds of perfectionism. At the heart of the problematic kind is a concern for how others see you, leading to doubts in your own worth. This so-called 'evaluative concern perfectionism' leads individuals to avoidance as a method of coping with stress (see link for problems this can cause) and review of the data suggests these people experience higher levels of hassle in life, along with more distress. But crucially, there is another strand of perfectionism, one that is primarily self-focused and concerned with personal standards. This strand is associated with active coping strategies, and with reaching higher levels of achievement. However, for these people, the higher amounts of life hassles - and possibly distress, although the data is less clear - remain. Flaxman emphasised that while the two strands involve different internal states, the behaviours can look identical from the outside.

One useful way to look at perfectionism is as an underlying vulnerability factor. Day-to-day perfectionism can chug away in the background, influencing but not determining behaviour, and if it's self-focused, it may facilitate better performance. But when experiencing achievement-related stress, such individuals encounter high distress. At its extreme, in the clinical context, failure is 'a fatal blow to the self', and can be associated with self-harming actions.

Flaxman urged his audience to foster more workplace-focused research in this area, as the field is still overwhelmingly clinical or student-focused - despite the fact that many of the survey instruments used explicitly reference work-related stressors, which often have to be removed before data is collected! And he showed evidence that interventions can be successful: his work with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a mindfulness-based approach, can help improve psychological flexibility, increase resilience, and reduce perfectionist attitudes.

Situations shape personality, just as personality shapes situations

It’s easy to think of ways that personality affects how we approach situations. But a new study looks at the other side of the coin: how situations alter our personality. This research suggests that while our personality at work has a stable, predictable quality, experience of meaningful events produces ‘personality states’ that deviate from our baseline traits.

Timothy Judge’s team recruited 122 participants in full employment into this online study, measuring their general personality traits at the outset using a combination of scales that all focused on the ‘Big 5’ traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness and neuroticism) that comprise our best understood model of personality. Over the next ten days, participants made daily recordings of their experiences at work, as well as rating personality states – how they saw themselves as being on that particular day – again using Big 5 scales. Participants were asked to make these daily entries as close to the end of the day as possible, and the online survey was only available for completion between 3 and 11pm.

Judge was interested in how personality states on one day are influenced by events on the previous day. Research suggests that the day is a meaningful unit for investigation, possibly because of the way sleep functions to consolidate experiences into learning; it also makes claims about causality more credible than looking at variables simultaneously. Here is a summary of the key findings:

Engaging in helpful, proactive organisational citizenship behaviours led to higher next-day extraversion, openness to experience and agreeableness. Engaging in personal goalsetting was associated with higher next-day conscientiousness; and high levels of intrinsic motivation – e.g. "Today, I’ve not needed a reason to work; I’ve worked because I want to" – was related to next-day agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. On the negative side,  work conflict on one day left participants in a heightened neurotic state the next.

Two things important to note. First personality state often influenced likelihood of next-day events: for instance, a higher state of openness was associated with more intrinsic motivation the following day. When you consider this, the data sounds a bit of a tangle – if motivation and openness climb for days, what’s driving what? – but the analysis used specific technical controls to separate out the effects. And of course, if personality were having no effect on how we behave, it wouldn’t be a very useful thing to measure in the first place. But it’s pertinent that the effects of event on state tended to be stronger than the reverse.

Secondly, personality states were always strongly associated with personality traits. Who we are still has a consistent quality, it's just that we vary around this. As with previous research (eg on affect spin http://bps-occupational-digest.blogspot.de/2011/08/some-of-us-experience-bigger-emotional.html), it appears that we each differ in how much we vary from our baseline. This study suggests that higher variability in our personality states may be associated with higher levels of trait neuroticism, and an up-one-day, down-the-next volatility certainly fits that profile.

Understanding that personality isn’t merely a static predisposition but involves interaction with the environment is a key part of ‘whole trait theory,’ an important advance in individual difference research. And it has practical applications: we often think about conscientious people as being those who tend to set goals. But it’s empowering to flip it, and know that setting goals is part of what makes us conscientious. It helps us better understand virtuous cycles, where one good turn produces the state that can lead to another, and keeps us aware of the power of dynamics in a working environment.

Judge TA, Simon LS, Hurst C, & Kelley K (2013). What I Experienced Yesterday Is Who I Am Today: Relationship of Work Motivations and Behaviors to Within-Individual Variation in the Five-Factor Model of Personality. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 24099348

Further reading:
Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 1011-1027. 

Hostility increases unemployment, unemployment increases hostility

We know that unemployment is self-perpetuating, due to reasons including stigma and skill loss. Now new research suggests a further component to this vicious circle: hostile people are more likely to be without work, but periods without work also seem to raise levels of hostility, at least in the short-term.

The research team, led by Christian Hakulinen, made use of a large Finnish longitudinal data set beginning in 1980 with the recruitment of children and adolescents. From this set, data was available on the employment status of 1465 participants at multiple time points, together with personality information related to hostility that participants completed in 1992, 2001, and 2007. This included items that tapped cynicism (e.g. through agreement with statements like 'Most people are honest chiefly through fear of being caught') and others focusing on paranoia and distrustful attitudes (e.g. via items like 'Others do not give me proper credit for my achievements'). Hostility is associated with distrust of others, using social support less effectively, and proneness to conflict. It is a plausible variable to focus on because it’s known to predict sickness leave, which is related to unemployment risk.
 
Hostility ratings in 2001 predicted unemployment status in 2007. The analysis controlled for educational background (including the parents' education, a good proxy for family socio-economic status). A similar effect was found for 1992 hostility and 2001 unemployment , but after controlling for education this relationship was no longer significant.
 This suggests that socio-economic status may be a mediator variable, with more hostile children achieving worse educationally and through this being at higher unemployment risk.

The analysis also found an effect in the reverse direction by looking at the 2001 data. Here, holding constant the likelihood an individual was hostile in the past - by controlling for 1992 hostility scores – the researchers found that a given person was more likely to be more hostile if they had some period of unemployment that year. Other analyses suggested unemployment may also influence  hostility in the future, but controlling for education again saw these effects rendered non-significant. So the only thing we can say with some confidence is that unemployment appears to affect hostility in the short-term.

Hostile individuals tend to be less active in job searches, and their suspicion and disinclination to approach others leaves them open to becoming isolated within the workplace, making higher unemployment understandable. This research draws attention to a second dynamic, where frustration from joblessness hardens exteriors and affects personality, at least in the short term. Such a vicious circle is one that we - through policy, organisational and individual choices - should try to prevent. It's important to note the silver lining of the effect of employment status: ignoring previous hostility levels, having a steady recent employment history is associated with lower hostility. So if there is a vicious circle, it's potentially one that can be broken.

Christian Hakulinen, Markus Jokela, Mirka Hintsanen, Laura Pulkki-Råback, Marko Elovainio, Taina Hintsa, Nina Hutri-Kähönen, Jorma Viikari, Olli T. Raitakari, & Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen (2013). Hostility and unemployment: A two-way relationship? Journal of Vocational Behaviour, 83, 153-160 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2013.04.003

Further reading:

Paul, K. I., & Moser, K. (2009). Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analyses. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 74(3), 264–282.

Who feels treated unfairly after taking an assessment?

Applicant reactions are the feelings people have about taking a given set of assessments in order to secure employment. We know that assessment design matters: applicants are happiest when given scope to show their capability through relevant challenges that did not demand inappropriate information.

Applicant factors matter too - obviously passing or failing the assessment can colour their perception, as can their 'attributional style' - but up to now there has been no consistent effect of applicant personality. Recent research takes a different angle that suggests perceptions of fairness depend on the applicant's personality type .

Finnish researchers Laura Honkaniemi and team suspected the problem with previous applicant reaction research was that it focused on correlations with personality traits - individual qualities such as extroversion, neuroticism and so on. This presumes that personality has its effect in a fairly linear way - 'more extraverted people will be happier in assessments', rather than involving an interplay between different features. Honkaniemi's team, working with personality data from applicants to Finnish Fire and Rescue Services, used an analytic technique to find four different personality types within the group of 258 applicants, which I describe below.

These individuals had all completed a set of physical assessments and then a psychological regime including interview, cognitive tests, a group exercise and a personality assessment (the Finnish version of the PRF). The final research sample (40 participants opted out of this) detailed applicant reactions, specifically on the use of psychological assessment, by rating items like 'I don’t understand what the psychological tests have to do with the future job tasks', after the assessment but before the outcomes were known. These items related to three areas: face validity - did the assessments seem relevant to the job?, predictive validity - do I think they can predict job performance? - and fairness perceptions - do I think this is a fair way to do things? No effect was found for the first two variables, but fairness was influenced by personality type for both successful and unsuccessful candidates.

Two of the personality types saw the process as significantly fairer than another. The first, typified by high conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and above average agreeableness and extraversion, is commonly identified within this personality typing process and labelled the Resilient type. Another hasn't been previously reported, the researchers dubbing it the 'Bohemian' due to its combination of low extraversion and low conscientiousness. In contrast the Overcontrolled group gave significantly lower fairness ratings. This is another classic type involving high neuroticism and low extroversion and agreeableness. Previous research has suggested this type is more likely to infer malevolence behind ambiguous behaviour, so their negative perceptions are consistent with this. Conversely, the Resilient profile, as the label implies, carries with it a strong tendency to adjust to circumstances and move forward, so less concerned with picking apart perceived wrongs. The authors speculate that the new type of Bohemian may have a  'let all flowers bloom' approach, their impulsive, uncompetitive nature making judgment unlikely.

A few notes: firstly, these personality types are rarely 'pure' but reflect nuances of the larger sample. Here, the Undercontrolled had higher extroversion than the Resilients, the opposite of what is seen in other studies. Secondly, the personality types are more than the sum of their parts: all these effects were obtained while controlling for the effects of the 14 individual personality traits within the PRF.

Applicant reactions matter. They can influence test performance, sour opinions of the employer, and affect a new hire's self-perception. Understanding who may experience a process as more unfair might be useful to employers for offering targeted support and feedback that takes their likely reactions into account.

Laura Honkaniemi, Taru Feldt, Riitta-Leena Metsäpelto, & Asko Tolvanen (2013). Personality Types and Applicant Reactions in Real-life Selection International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 21 (1), 32-45 DOI: 10.1111/ijsa.12015

Further reading:
Ployhart, R. E., & Harold, C. M. (2004). The Applicant Attribution-Reaction Theory (AART): An integrative theory of applicant attributional processing. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 12, 84–98.

Status shifts in groups as extraverts disappoint and neurotics overdeliver

New research suggests that the higher status bestowed on extraverts in new groups may drop as their contributions become better understood. In the meantime, neurotic people may see their lower status improve.

Corrine Bendersky and Neha Parikh Shah investigated this in two studies. The first examined how 44 student teams working on MBA assignments over 10 weeks attributed status and competence to individual members. One week after forming, each member was asked to rate the other 3 to 5 members' group status - e.g., 'To what extent does each individual influence the group’s decisions?' - and expected level of contribution to the group. Ten weeks after meeting, the members again rated each other on status and (now actual) contributions.

Personality measures taken at the start of the course showed that more neurotic individuals received lower status ratings at the first measurement stage, but made gains at the second stage. Extraverts, meanwhile, received marginally higher initial ratings but these decreased by time two. The effects were small, possibly because researchers controlled for a wide range of measures including other personality factors, gender, cognitive ability and individual assignment grades, which may soak up what might otherwise be observed. Further analysis confirmed effects were not due to regression to the mean, as variability in ratings was similar across the two time points. Instead, it appeared that the status changes were due to neurotics being seen to contribute more than had been expected, and extroverts less than expected.

In a computer-based experimental follow-up, 340 participants rated a hypothetical colleague before and after seeing their response to a request to assist the participant on a task. Beforehand, the colleague received higher status ratings when described using extraverted keywords, and was considered more likely to assist than when they were described as neurotic. However, when the colleague responded with a generous offer of help, neurotics were rewarded with greater increases in ratings than extraverts. And when the colleague was tight with their time, they were punished more heavily when portrayed as an extravert.

Extraverts find it easier to make a rapid, positive impact, being assertive, dominant and talkative. But for ongoing contributions to a team, their demeanour may introduce problems. They can be poorer listeners, and less able to cope with others being proactive, leading to group competition. This means that initially high expectations can lead to disappointment. Meanwhile, the low self-belief and and sense of powerlessness associated with neuroticism can make it easy to dismiss their group value. But neurotics are keen to avoid social disapproval and not be seen as incompetent, making them motivated to prepare for activities and put effort in, over-delivering on their original promise.

Bendersky and Shah argue that we should recognise that status is responsive to these factors, updating dynamically as a group gets to know each other or experiences different conditions. And in terms of practical implications, they offer a warning:  'Managers may rely too heavily on extraverted employees, which could be problematic if these individuals become less appreciated group members over time. In contrast, introverted and neurotic employees may be underutilized because managers inaccurately assume they will be less effective team members. With experience working together, however, both types of people may be important and valued contributors to their teams.'

Bendersky, C., & Shah, N. (2012). The Downfall of Extraverts and Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups Academy of Management Journal, 56 (2), 387-406 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0316

Further reading:
Judge, T. A., & Bono, J. E. 2001. Relationship of core self-evaluations traits—Self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability — With job satisfaction and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86: 80 –92.

Workplace psychopathy: what consequences does it have?

Continuing our report on Smith and Lilienfeld's review of workplace psychopathy (part one here), we turn to the consequences it has - for leadership, for the organisation, and for unethical, even criminal behaviour.

Leadership effects

Is psychopathy behind 'dark-side' and maladaptive approaches to leadership? Last post discussed a study by Babiak et al study looking at rates of psychopathy. The study also collected 360 data, and that data suggests that high scorers tended to be seen as weaker in supporting their team. However, they were also seen as more innovative than lower scorers. Some research suggests that start-up entrepreneurs tend to have stronger psychopathic traits, consistent with this, but a recent study counters this, suggesting that once core entrepreneurial traits are taken into account, psychopathy doesn't assist in innovation-related entrepreneurial outcomes.

Turning to research on leadership style, a study with management students suggests those who score higher in psychopathy are more likely to use passive leadership styles rather than transformational leadership. However, monomethod issues apply here. Another interesting study called for presidential historian experts to rate features of various presidents. Poorer presidential performance was associated with the Fearless Dominance subscale, and the Self-Centered impulsivity subscale with problems like tolerating unethical behaviour in subordinates and events like empeachment.

As you can see, a range of effects have been observed, but what the literature could really do with is corroboration of specific effects, preferably via replication.

Organisational consequences

Psychopaths are toxic for organisations, undermining them and making them less effective. Right? The review reaches a surprising conclusion here. Drawing on a meta-analysis looking at workplace performance and counterproductive work behaviours, it concludes that while there may be an effect, it appears very weak. One trend in the data was that psychopathy had an even weaker affect on work outcomes when found in positions of authority, running counter to the concept that 'nasty' traits are survivable but lead to senior derailment.

Recent single studies suggest that aggressive negotiation tactics such as threats and manipulation are associated with psychopathy directly or with dark triad trait scores (this includes psychopathy alongside related constructs such as narcissism and machiavellianism).
Again, these studies (and some of those in the meta-analysis suffer from the mono-method flaw which can artificially inflate findings.

This all suggests that at best, the impact of psychopathic traits on measurable CWB and performance is not as ruinous as popular reports may suggest.

Unethical and criminal behaviour

Ok, maybe not ruinous, but how about unethical? There is some evidence for this. Global psychopathy scores in students are associated with more willingness to take an unethical route in response to a hypothetical work dilemma. And MBAs with lower levels in Kohlberg's cognitive moral development and take a subjectivist approach that places personal values over universal moral ones were on average higher in psychopathy, albeit almost entirely due to a single subscale rather than higher ratings across the construct.

Moving from hypothetical decisions, another study found that employees with managers they rated higher on psychopathic traits believed their organisation showed less social responsibility and committment to employees. However, this again falls foul of mono-method issues.

What about perpetrators of white collar crime? This is where popular accounts really bandy about connections, with prominent criminals such as Bernie Madoff depicted as "poster boys for successful corporate psychopathy".
Studies looking at undergraduates  suggests that willingness to countenance white collar criminal acts is associated with psychopathy traits.

But when it comes to direct evidence, there is very little. One modestly sized sample of encarcerated individuals with either white collar, non-white collar or a mixture of convictions was assessed on a range of psychopathy sub-scales, but none of the hypothesised differences were observed. While other subscores did differ across different combinations of groups (e.g.,  (Machiavellian Egocentricity for the White+Mixed was higher than the non-White-collar) but these non-predicted findings are exploratory.

Conclusion

Smith and Lilienfield conclude that 'current evidence that psychopathy is tied to negative outcomes in the workplace is suggestive, but not conclusive'. I find the review important in reminding us that cruel, selfish or aggressive acts don't require the perpetrator to be psychopathic, and asking us to be a little more careful in attributing the ailments of the business world to one specific condition.

Smith, S., & Lilienfeld, S. (2013). Psychopathy in the workplace: The knowns and unknowns Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18 (2), 204-218 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2012.11.007

Highly extraverted sales people perform more poorly

What sales manager wouldn't hire extraverts? They tend to be comfortable in interactions, naturally display enthusiasm and confidence for their own ideas, and can be firm and persistent when they meet with resistance to their agenda. Scrutinise many sales forces and you'll probably spot this reasoning at work.

Yet research finds weak and sometimes inconsistent relationships between sales performance and extraversion, with three meta-analyses finding the summed effects to amount to .07 - a non-significant finding. A new study by Adam Grant from the Wharton School, Pennsylvania, suggests that the sweet spot for sales performance might instead be balanced between extraversion and introversion.

Grant looked at week-on-week sales performance (revenue earned) for 340 outbound sales executives over three months. All completed a big-five personality inventory beforehand, comprising extraversion along with the other four primary personality dimensions; the inventory required them to rate their agreement with various items using a seven-point Likert scale. Regression analysis on the data revealed no linear relationship between extraversion and sales performance, instead finding a quadratic effect. Specifically, performance rose with extraversion until a peak at 4.5, well before the maximum of seven. From this point, performance actually decreased.

In hard numbers, the performers at the peak made on average $151 per hour, versus $127 for those whose extraversion was a standard deviation below, and a more meagre $115 for those a standard deviation above. Grant's analysis confirmed that the findings were not being driven by a confound from other personality factors, for instance a toxic combination of low agreeableness and high extraversion which might invite conflicts.

Why might those falling more towards the middle of the scale perform better? Grant dubs these 'ambiverts' and suggests that they are more likely to engage in give and take with clients, falling back to listening as introverts tend to, but then being willing to act and engage. Meanwhile, the strongly extraverted may fall into a range of traps - the dark underbelly of their strengths - by dominating others, projecting overconfidence, and sending obvious 'influence' signals that may lead to prospective customers raising their defences.

Grant concludes that organisations may want to look harder at the relationship between personality and sales performance to guide recruitment strategies, and that they may 'benefit from training highly extraverted salespeople to model some of the quiet, reserved tendencies of their more introverted peers'.

 
Grant, A. (2013). Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463706


Further reading:

Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9–30. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2389.00160

Some of us are more suited to productive conflict

If you're interested in how team conflict can be beneficial, here's more research on the issue from Bret Bradley and colleagues, this time focusing on team member personality. Although we know that certain personality traits affect whether conflict occurs - for instance, less agreeable people are more likely to find themselves in a clash - this research investigated what matters when it occurs.

Bradley and colleagues figured that two traits might be critical. People more open to experience are more likely to raise issues and enjoy frank discussion, but are also willing to compromise and be flexible in terms of how they are prepared to act in the future. Similarly, emotionally stable people tend not to anxiously skirt issues but are willing to go to others to voice problems directly, and are more likely to contribute to positive emotional states within the team, regarding other members positively. We might expect such people to be involved in transparent and resolvable conflicts.

As with the previous work, the study drew on real academic performance of undergraduate business students, working in 117 teams with an average of five members apiece. Each team worked interdependently for 13 weeks, culminating in a final term project, which was evaluated to give information about team performance. Participants completed a questionnaire on personality in week four and another on task conflict in week ten. A week four exam was used to control for levels of content knowledge within the group.

The results of the study was firm and striking. Teams who had a high average openness to experience actively benefited from high task conflict. But those low in this area benefited from low task conflict. In fact, the high-high group and the low-low group had a comparable level of performance. Exactly the same pattern was found with emotional stability; meanwhile, none of the other Big 5 personality traits produced such effects.

The authors conclude that both openness to experience and emotional stability are important features of teams that get involved with conflict. The study poses another point: while conflict may be functional for some groups, others thrive in low-conflict conditions. This would explain the  near-zero relationship between the two observed from meta-analysis, and suggest that we should be cautious of maxims such as 'a little conflict is good for you'. On the basis of this study, it seems this would depend on who you are, and who your colleagues are, too.

Bradley, B., Klotz, A., Postlethwaite, B., & Brown, K. (2013). Ready to rumble: How team personality composition and task conflict interact to improve performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (2), 385-392 DOI: 10.1037/a0029845
 
Further reading:

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 741–749. DOI:10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741

One personality to rule them all?

(We're reporting from this month's Division of Occupational Psychology conference at the Digest. This post is from regular editor Alex Fradera, and the report will also feature in March issue of The Psychologist magazine.)

Until recently I was pretty ignorant of the idea of a general factor of personality, a situation which undoubtedly hurt my psychology-nerd cred. I'm back on track now, thanks to an afternoon spent in Rob McIver's symposium on the matter.

The general factor of personality, or GFP, is analoguous to g, the intelligence quotient that predicts to differing degrees the multiple intelligences - verbal, musical, numerical -that sit below it. (The symposium reminded us that whereas Spearman posited g in the 1900s, and Thurstone the differential intelligence model in the twenties, it took until the 1950s for Phillip Vernon to reconcile the models).

While practitioners who use personality emphasise its differential qualities - many facets, no one right profile - the academics who advocate GFP say that on the contrary, there is such a thing as having lots of personality, and that this global factor is meaningful, predicting a range of life outcomes. Critics say this may be down to statistical artefacts, such as an individual's desire for social desirability influencing all their questionnaire responses. So this symposium took us into the science, and particularly what it means for practitioners.

The first session, given by Rainer Kurz of Saville Consulting, was the most technical in focus, introducing a way to get a GFP simply by summing raw scores on each Big Five personality measure. It's an intuitive approach that in his dataset of 308 mixed roles proved as valid in predicting job performance as the standard approach (extracting the 'first unrotated principle component') while avoiding some fiddly statistical issues. However, the GFP was not comprehensive, as after partialling out its variance he found significant influences of personality subcomponents remained, notably assertiveness and achievement. This suggests the add-up method doesn't quite account for their influence. He concluded that this was a promising recipe but the approach will take refining.

His colleague Rob McIver chose to put aside notions of 'the ideal GFP' to explore total personality scores that predict success on a particular capability-set - in most cases, a job. Rather than relying just on factor extraction or the add-it-all-up approach, this starts by developing and shaping tests to pre-fit the criterion you care about.

McIver's data drew on external raters who had judged various facets of workplace effectiveness for the same individuals described by Kurz in his earlier presentation. The individuals had also completed seven different personality tests, and McIver explained how he generated a total personality score for each one using a criterion approach: personality dimensions were mapped onto effectiveness based on logic and previously reported relationships, meaning some dimensions were weighted heavily and others not at all if judged irrelevant to effectiveness. McIver showed how their own questionnaire, developed from the ground up around these effectiveness factors, produced the most powerfully predictive total scores, with an r up to .32.

McIver went further, producing a personality super-score for each participant by totalling all seven tests together. Would it work, given that many of these questionnaires were not developed with this effectiveness framework in mind? It turns out that united they stand, pretty well, with a validity of .27, thanks in some part to the criterion-based pruning and weighing. McIver concluded that this approach may be more profitable than searching for one true GFP.

Between these two talks Rob Bailey of OPP took the floor to question whether, in any case, true GFPs could truly be useful for practitioners. He points out that the literature tends to describe the general factor as reflecting people who are relaxed, sociable, emotionally intelligent, satisfied with life, and altruistic - and that a low score means the opposite of these things. He challenged the symposium to imagine cases where such information could be provided to an individual in any constructive fashion, compared to the conventional profiling approach.

Bailey then went to the data, in this case taken from over 1,200 individuals paid to complete a 16-factor personality questionnaire, the absence of career implications giving them little incentive to 'fake nice' and apply spin to their results. His component analysis suggested the personality data could reduce to two factors, not fewer, and he showed how opting to use the dual factors rather than the 16 original ones weakened the ability to predict variables such as job satisfaction, dropping coverage from 9.3% of the variance to 7.5%.

He concluded that granularity, not fat factors, may be a better bet for predictive power, and also cautioned that the differences he finds (no single factor, more value in the parts than a whole) may result from using a personality measure that isn't built to the specifications of the Big Five, and that in fact dependence on that model may be under-valuing the diversity, and thus relevance, of personality itself.

When the dust settled, the questions remained, but the issue of the GFP will undoubtedly be one we will revisit.

Further reading:

van der Linden, D., te Nijenhuis, J., & Bakker, A. (2010). The General Factor of Personality: A meta-analysis of Big Five intercorrelations and a criterion-related validity study Journal of Research in Personality, 44 (3), 315-327 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2010.03.003

Sticking with self-employment: the traits that matter

Although I'm largely self-employed, life within an organisation is recent enough that I can recall some of its attractions: regulated income, conscientious support staff, nice equipment. Still, I'm happy as I am, having never once felt the inclination to pack it in and look for a job.  Some of that owes to circumstance - and no little luck - but a recent piece of research suggests there may be important individual characteristics that differentiate those who persist in self-employment from those who leave it.

The study, by Pankaj Patel and Sherry Thatcher, gathers data on a subset of people from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which collected waves of information on a cohort of people who left high school in 1957. Their employment history was coded to note moves into self-employment and the duration it lasted. This was used to model the influence of a number of individual variables, after controlling for a host of factors including income and prestige in jobs (which might unduly tempt individuals to stay in place), family precedents such as a self-employed parent, and so on.

Patel and Thatcher were interested in the Big Five personality traits, as these have been shown to differentiate people in entrepreneurial roles, which form part of the self-employment population. The analysis suggested that  individuals who are more emotionally stable are more likely to enter, and then to persist in, self-employment, as are those who are more open to experience. This pattern, similar to that found in entrepreneurs, is fairly intuitive: confidence and resilience in the first case, and flexibility and problem-solving curiosity in the second, are vital features of the jack-of-all-trades (and crises) that the self-employed need to be. However, while entrepreneurs are more likely to be extraverted, conscientious, and less agreeable (that is, less concerned about people's feelings), none of these factors influenced decisions to start or persist in self-employment.

The team also predicted that aspects of psychological well-being - a set of beliefs about your place in the world - would also matter, specifically those utilitarian ones concerning how we can get ahead in the world. The verdict was mixed: Personal growth, the belief that you are able to learn and grow had no impact on self-employment. Meanwhile, those who believed they could master their environment were more drawn to self-employment but no more likely to persist in it. The only aspect that influenced both entering and persisting in self-employment was autonomy, the belief that independence was important to them.  The study also found that individuals more likely to tenaciously persist with goals and re-frame negative obstacles to see them as still achievable were more likely to continue to go it alone.

The self-employed, then, are marked out by individual qualities, but they don't map neatly onto the entrepreneur model. The study suggests that a sense of independence, curiosity and a tendency not to ruminate help people persevere in this kind of work, along with a goal-focused tenacity. But it seems the field is too diverse to demand extraversion, a highly systematic outlook, or a particular sensitivity to other people. Being your own boss comes in many shapes and sizes.

Patel, P., & Thatcher, S. (2012). Sticking It Out: Individual Attributes and Persistence in Self-Employment Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312446643

Tendency to 'move against' others predicts managerial derailment

Derailment is when a manager with a great track record hits the skids, often spectacularly. It's highly undesirable, for the disruption and human harm it can involve, and its costs, which after tallying up lost productivity, transition, and costs of a new hire, can exceed twice an annual salary in the case of executive departures.

As a result, organisational researchers have developed measures of 'derailment potential' that consider key suspect behaviours such as betraying trust, deferring decisions, or avoiding change. Work to date has confirmed that managers fired from organisations are judged to be higher in these derailers, but these were post-hoc judgments that could have reflected biased hindsight rather than honest evaluations. 

To avoid this, a new study led by Marisa Carson utilises database information on 1,796 managers from a large organisation to examine behaviours rated during employment tenure instead of on departure. Each behaviour was rated by between eight and ten sources - from subordinates to supervisors – with ratings combined into single potential scores. Drawing on staff turnover data, the study confirmed that individuals exhibiting more derailment potential behaviours were more likely to later be ejected from the organisation. In addition, they were more likely to leave early of their own volition, suggesting they jumped before they were pushed.

The study also looked beyond the behaviours exhibited to the traits that might be behind them, through a personality inventory, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), that all managers had completed. The researchers were exploring the philosophy that derailment isn't caused by a deficit in positive traits such as conscientiousness, but the presence of additional, unhelpful qualities, measured in the HDS, that resemble features of clinical disorders. These traits come in three areas: 'moving away from people' such as a cynical, doubtful disposition, 'moving against people' including manipulation and a tendency to drama, and a third area of 'moving towards people' involving an abiding eagerness to please and defer to others.

Carson's team predicted each of these areas would predict derailment behaviours, but in the analysis only one mattered: moving against people. This factor also predicted turnover of both kinds, and its effect on turnover was brokered by higher derailment behaviours. Conversely the 'away' area turned out to relate negatively, but non-significantly, to the derailment scores, and the 'toward' area didn't emerge as a coherent factor during preliminary analysis so wasn't pursued further. The story here, then, is that qualities that rub up badly against others, such as attention-seeking, idiosyncracy, over-confidence and rule-bending translate into red-flag behaviours that predict early exit from the organisation.

What to be done? This research provides some support for screening for these types of tendencies early in a manager's career, in order to inform decisions about future role as well as identifying priority areas for training and development. These efforts, should they avert derailment, are likely to pay off in the long run.

Marisa Adelman Carson, Linda Rhoades Shanock, Eric D. Heggestad, Ashley M. Andrew, S. Douglas Pugh, & Matthew Walter (2012). The Relationship Between Dysfunctional Interpersonal Tendencies, Derailment Potential Behavior, and Turnover Journal of Business and Psychology , 27 (3), 291-304 DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9239-0

Ambition predicts attainments over lifetime and contributes to satisfaction

Ambition is a quality of clear relevance to the world of work, but its psychological definition has been murky. A recent paper begins to clear the waters, proposing that ambition is essentially a middle-level trait, meaning that it gives a specific form to the tendencies that flow from more fundamental features such as personality traits. So what are those fundamentals? And what occupational consequences does ambition have?

Investigators Timothy Judge and John Kammeyer-Mueller drew on the longitudinal data contained in the Terman life-cycle study, begun in 1922. Available information included personality measures, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test, biographical factors and various indicators of life outcomes. Ambition, defined as 'persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment', wasn't the explicit focus of the initial study, so the measure used was a composite of items including a rating of life purpose, parental judgements of childhood ambition, and a coding of participants' descriptions of their own best and worst qualities to catch any references to ambition - or lack of it.

Building a structural equation model makes it possible to see how one factor can contribute to another, which in turn contributes to another, in a web of cause-and-effect. The model revealed that ambition was greater in the 717 records used when the following factors were present (brackets denote investigator explanation):

• Higher conscientiousness (providing the will to achieve)
• Higher extraversion (through striving in social situations, often related to confidence)
• Lower neuroticism (as doubt reduces likelihood of setting ambitious goals)
• Family prestige (creating a climate where high achievement is the norm)
• A fairly weak relationship to higher childhood general mental ability (leading to encouragement and expectations of success)

The longitudinal data made it possible to look forward to the consequences of ambition. More ambitious individuals tended to attain more in their education and enter into jobs with more prestige. A prestigious job was also a predictor of both income and life satisfaction.  As is increasingly recognised, people more satisfied with their life tended to live longer. In all these areas, ambition was a better predictor of life outcomes than its antecedents such as conscientiousness and extraversion, suggesting that focusing on middle-level traits when trying to understand real-world outcomes may be a sensible research strategy.

Ambition isn't about a single strong aspiration, it's a general orientation towards getting ahead. Commentators are often suspicious of this as  nothing more than an 'unquenchable desire for unattainable outcomes', but Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller point out that on their data, the ambitious 'did not appear to be made miserable or insatiable by their ambitions'. Instead, it seems that this forward impetus can help individuals make inroads into at least some of their wants for life.

Judge TA, & Kammeyer-Mueller JD (2012). On the Value of Aiming High: The Causes and Consequences of Ambition. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 22545622

What makes a maverick?

Who are the mavericks who take the path less travelled and bring organisations along in their wake?  We can point to individuals, such as the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, but there has been little empirical work to establish the personal profile that predicts maverickism.

Enter Elliroma Gardiner and Chris J. Jackson, who gathered data online from 458 full-time workers within a range of sectors, seeking to map a range of personal variables onto their measure of maverickism. This measure captured the tendency to behave in disruptive, bold, risk-taking ways to achieve goals. It was also constructed to capture only functional maverickism, on the basis that when these behaviours lead to failures rather than successes the instigator is labelled a misfit or deviant, not a maverick; a typical item was "I have a knack for getting things right when least expected."

What predicted maverickism? After accounting for the predictive power of maleness - associated with maverickism - the  regression analysis revealed what was contributed by personality. More extraverted participants tended to be mavericks, reflecting the energetic, sociable side needed to push new ideas. Mavericks were also open to experience, the personality trait that reflects willingness to try new things and act against the status quo. Those with high maverickism tended to be lower in agreeableness, which the investigators had predicted: you may need some social skills to be a maverick, but you also need to be comfortable with people resenting your approach and with upsetting people.

Gardiner and Jackson found two other measures mattered after personality was taken into account. One came from a computer task of risky behaviour, where participants gained in-game money by inflating balloons bigger - but lost cash when they burst. In a condition where balloons became very sensitive in a second stage, raising the risks markedly, those who finished with more ruptured rubber had higher maverickism scores. The final measure was of laterality: the degree to which we rely on one side of our body over another. Participants with a stronger left-ear preference were more likely to report maverick behaviour... if they also scored low in the personality variable of neuroticism. Why? Left body laterality implies right brain laterality, and some lines of evidence suggest this is associated with creativity. Creative ideas can make a good maverick - but not if we're too anxious to act on them, as high neuroticism would imply.

The research suggests that maverick behaviour originates from individuals who are extraverted, curious, tough toward others, and fairly inured to punishing risk. The data also suggests that a combo of an emotionally stable personality with a creative capacity facilitates maverickism, although we might want to see this measured directly using measures of creativity.  I'm left fascinated by what differentiates the maverick from the workplace deviant. It could be about picking the right risks, but note that our functional mavericks stuck to their bold (but non-optimal) balloon strategy even in the face of feedback (bursts) that led others to cool off.   Are the mavericks just the lucky ones?

Gardiner, E., & Jackson, C. (2011). Workplace mavericks: How personality and risk-taking propensity predicts maverickism British Journal of Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02090.x

Perfectionists worry away the benefits of a break from work

Go on, have a few days off. Take a week - you've certainly earned it! Clear your mind, take a break - things will tick over til you return...

Easier said than done, of course. But respites from work are valuable, replenishing resources and preventing negative loads (mental fatigue, adrenaline build-up) spiralling out of control. Sadly, the positive gloss of the holiday itself tends to slip quickly when we return to work - a 'fade-out effect' described well in this Psychologist article.  What makes you more likely to fall prey to the fade-out? The quest for perfection, new research suggests.

Researcher Paul Flaxman and colleagues canvassed academics before, during and on two occasions after an Easter break, measuring changes in well-being. The 77 participants also completed a tool that measures self-critical perfectionism; this form of perfectionism centres around high standards and doubting your actions are sufficient to reach them. As this attribute is triggered by achievement -related stressors, such as deadlines or presentations, the researchers suspected the holiday itself would likely be a genuine respite for all, but that those high in this attribute could quickly crash once they returned to work.

Pre-holiday, perfectionists were worse off in terms of well-being: more exhausted, anxious and fatigued than their colleagues. During the holiday, their wellbeing raised and fell in line with colleagues. Yet, at return to work, they quickly reported higher exhaustion, giving way to higher anxiety a few weeks later, with consistently higher fatigue across both time points. The finding accounted for differences in respite wellbeing, length of respite, and how much participants worked during the respite.

What's driving this? Participants reported on holiday cognitions, and it turns out that time spent ruminating about the correctness of past judgments and repeatedly worrying about future events led to more emotional exhaustion and anxiety on return to work. The effect that perfectionism has on the various wellbeing measures was partly due to the mediating influence of these 'perseverative cognitions', which explained at least a quarter and in one case (fatigue) two thirds of the effect. Why didn't these thoughts drag holiday wellbeing down, too? Flaxman's group conjecture that  these cognitions are functional in the short-term, staving off uncomfortable feelings (I should be doing something!) by rehearsing intentions in your head. However, by preventing psychological detachment from work, this strategy foregoes any chance to shake things off and lighten the load.

If you feel that the world might collapse if you took the invitation at the top of this piece, you might want to explore holiday activities that are extremely absorbing and take you well away from the work mentality; you might also want to switch off your work mobile.  The researchers also note that interventions such as CBT and mindfulness-based training may be effective in cushioning perfectionist beliefs from harming quality of life.

Flaxman PE, Ménard J, Bond FW, & Kinman G (2012). Academics' Experiences of a Respite From Work: Effects of Self-Critical Perfectionism and Perseverative Cognition on Postrespite Well-Being. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 22545621

A case for putting guilt-prone people in charge

Leadership research has  gained an appetite for dispositional affect, a person's tendency to feel one way more than another. Individuals who regularly express positive affects like pride or enthusiasm are seen as better leaders and produce better outcomes. Negative affects, meanwhile, are less consistently useful: although bursts of appropriate anger can help to focus efforts, frequent expressions of negative emotions lead to poor outcomes for followers such as stress and poor coordination. But recent study may change the conversation, as it suggests that a dispositional affect towards feeling guilty makes you more suitable for leadership, both in the eyes of others and through your efforts.

Stanford researchers Rebecca Schaumberg and Francis Flynn began online, asking 243 employed people to review a personality profile full of dummy responses to a set of questions, including some linked to unfortunate scenarios such as running down an animal. Half the participants looked at a fabricated profile with responses to the scenario focusing on guilt-proneness: how true is it that "You’d feel bad you hadn’t been more alert driving down the road"?  The researchers believed that participants in this group would rate the profile as having more leadership potential when it contained higher (vs lower) ratings of guilt, an emotion which leads you to review your behaviour and seek to fix things. Meanwhile the other half saw responses to shame-proneness ("You would think ‘I’m terrible’"), shame being another 'self-conscious' emotion but one that lacks the urge to act and involves simply a self-directed negative reaction. As expected, profiles high rather than low in guilt proneness were rated as more capable leaders, but levels of shame-proneness had no effect. People who are emotionally involved in redressing bad situations are seen as better leaders.

In the next study, things got real. 140 university staff and students completed surveys including a measure of guilt-proneness, before meeting in groups to carry out two exercises, one figuring out how to survive in the desert, another marketing chosen products by generating taglines and pitches. Participants then rated each team-mate on the degree of leadership that emerged during the sessions. A neat analysis technique allowed Schaumberg and Flynn to put aside relational effects (I get on best with you) and perceiver biases (I rate everyone high on leadership) to derive a true leadership score for each participant. As before, those scores were highest for the most guilt-prone.

 A final study combined survey data with that from a prior 360-degree feedback process for a group of 139 MBAs. The researchers found that 360 items that related to leader effectiveness were rated higher for individuals who expressed higher guilt proneness in the survey. This study also suggested that  guilt proneness partially makes its effect through another variable, how much responsibility to lead the participant felt. To reverse the aphorism, with great responsibility can come great power.

 The evidence then suggests that being driven by guilt to be conscious and caring about how your actions affect the wellbeing of others can help people to be perceived as leaders, emerge as leaders, and have an impact as leaders. However, Schaumberg and Flynn point out that the guilt-prone may be hesitant to take control, taking seriously the potential impact of their actions, and not wanting to displace others hopeful for the role; in summary, "the kind of people who would make outstanding leaders may, in some cases, be reluctant to occupy leadership roles." It may be the job of organisations to coax out these reluctant leaders and cultivate their responsibility to lead.

Schaumberg, R., & Flynn, F. (2012). Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown: The Link Between Guilt Proneness and Leadership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0028127

The truth about nice guys, mean girls, and pay

Analyses suggest that a personality high in agreeableness is associated with lower earnings. This might seem surprising, given that agreeableness is associated with interpersonal effectiveness, increasingly important in jobs. But at least it helps explain why women experience pay inequality, given that women tend to have warm qualities; if they want to earn more, they better toughen up, right? If this seems reasonable, you'd do well to read on, and appreciate the work of a recent study that seeks to uncover more about why disagreeableness breeds pay, and why the situation for women is rather different.

Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston, and Charlice Hurst investigated the factors influencing pay using three large data sets, each containing data on between 500 and 2000 adults. Each collected personality information using slightly different measures; as each study corroborated the other, I treat this difference as a strength of the paper, as convergent evidence from multiple measures precludes the possibility that the instruments used were generating funky results. In each case, men tended to earn more than women (in one data set this was made explicit as approximately $5,000 less per year), and disagreeable people earned more. However, this mean premium was mostly due to the wage benefit that men received; for women, the premium was much slighter. Across studies, agreeableness made a big difference to male incomes, and a minor one to female ones.

So what makes the mean premium possible? It's not entirely clear - the study investigated some possible reasons such as that disagreeable people find their way into higher status or more complex jobs, but the data didn't support that conclusion. They did find that disagreeable people place more importance on pay and less on communal relationships than others, which sheds light on their priorities but not on how these are achieved. Some possibilities include agreeable people being more prepared to compromise and concede, for example on pay negotiation, or for decision-makers to falsely place warmth and competence as two ends of a continuum (rather than independent factors) and conclude that a people person may be less capable. Highly agreeable men would not only lack those edges, but, as Judge and colleagues point out, are doubly disadvantaged, as they are operating against gender stereotypes by being a soft male. Conversely, the edge that a disagreeable woman gains is blunted by their operating in ways that aren't socially sanctioned. The authors reflect that "exhortations for women not to be nice...might be overblown", and the solutions to gender pay inequality lie foremost with decision-makers.

Perhaps the causality is reversed – well-paid jobs make people less agreeable? There are a few points against this: firstly, the failure to find linkages between job type (such as status) and agreeableness. More convincingly, the investigators ran an additional, experimental study, where 480 student participants made choices in an imaginary scenario as to who they would recommend for a management fast-tract. The pair of candidates only differed according to keywords inserted in the text that speak to the quality of agreeableness, such as modest/immodest. The same pattern emerged – more recommendations for disagreeable people, with a much stronger effect for men than for women. Taken on its own, this suggests that disagreeableness is driving job outcomes, rather than the reverse.

So do nice guy finish poorly, and women last? Well, it depends what matters to you. Judge's third study found that agreeableness - and to a lesser extent, being a woman - was positively associated with life satisfaction, stronger social networks, and community involvement, and negatively associated with stress. Essentially, the disagreeable-man priorities are having exactly the impact you would expect; as the authors conclude, "if disagreeable men win the earnings war, it is a victory that may come at some cost."

Judge, T., Livingston, B., & Hurst, C. (2012). Do nice guys—and gals—really finish last? The joint effects of sex and agreeableness on income. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (2), 390-407 DOI: 10.1037/a0026021