In the corporate world, there has been a noticeable increase in interest surrounding the Five Factor Approach, despite the presence of various alternative personality models, since the mid-1980s. Big five test can be taken for free by using the Psyculator website. Essentially, this approach suggests that human personality can be distilled into just five fundamental factors, commonly recognized as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, sometimes referred to as Emotional Stability (Block, 1995, 2001; John & Srivastava, 1999).
These broad factors are intricately linked to more specific personality traits, often referred to as personality facets. The most widely accepted framework, known as the Five Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), commonly referred to as the Big Five, encompasses 30 lower-level personality facets (with six facets corresponding to each broad factor). For example, Neuroticism is associated with attributes such as anxiety and anger; Conscientiousness evaluates qualities like self-discipline and planning abilities; Agreeableness encompasses traits such as altruism and empathy; Extraversion measures sociability and extroversion, while Openness generally assesses one’s inclination toward embracing new experiences.
Substantial research has solidified the idea that personality can reliably predict job performance. Consider Conscientiousness, for instance, which is regarded as the most robust predictor of job performance across a wide range of professions. It consistently demonstrates predictive correlations across various meta-analyses: .18 (Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991); .22 (Barrick & Mount, 1991); .24 (Hurtz & Donovan, 2000); .26 (Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, & Crawford, 2013). In simpler terms, Conscientiousness accounts for up to 6.8 percent of the variation in job performance. While this might appear modest, it’s important to note that after IQ, which is recognized as the most potent predictor of job performance, the Big Five personality factors emerge as the second most influential predictors for job outcomes. Significantly, personality adds an extra layer of predictive value beyond IQ, suggesting that a portion of job performance attributed to personality cannot be solely attributed to employees’ intellectual capabilities.
What’s even more intriguing is the extensive body of research indicating that personality can offer insights into various critical organizational metrics beyond job performance. Numerous meta-analyses have confirmed the crucial role of personality in predicting job satisfaction (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), burnout (Alarcon, Eschleman, & Bowling, 2009), absenteeism (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 2003; Salgado, 2002), presenteeism (Johns, 2010; Miraglia, & Johns, 2016), workplace accidents (Clarke & Robertson, 2005; Clarke & Robertson, 2008), organizational commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), organizational justice (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001), and counterproductive workplace behavior (Grijalva & Newman, 2015).
Furthermore, other meta-analytic studies emphasize the importance of personality assessments in predicting both positive and negative leadership styles (Bono & Judge, 2004; Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Van Engen, 2003). Regarding the latter, personality assessments serve as valuable tools for identifying destructive leaders whose actions have adverse effects on organizations (e.g., Babiak & Hare, 2006; Campbell, Hoffman, Campbell, & Marchisio, 2011; Mathieu, Hare, Jones, Babiak, & Neumann, 2013). Importantly, a growing body of organizational research has linked destructive leadership to workplace bullying (e.g., Boddy, 2005, 2010, 2015), with a recent study indicating that in a sample of working individuals in the United States, psychopathic and narcissistic leadership styles explained as much as 41 percent and 25 percent of the variance in workplace bullying, and up to 20 percent of the variance in employee depression (Tokarev, Phillips, Hughes, & Irwing, 2017). This carries significant economic costs, with the organizational costs of workplace bullying in the UK alone estimated to range from four to four and a half billion pounds annually, attributed to lost productivity and legal expenses (Rayner, 1997; Sheehan, 1999). In fact, the issue of workplace bullying is so persistent that Einarsen (1999) asserted that “Bullying at work… is a more debilitating and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stressors combined” (p.2).”