Investigating Most Optimal Personality Traits for Job Performance

Introduction

Companies continuously aim to continuously improve job performance to maximise profits. Although financial incentives can positively influence a firm’s productivity, businesses may opt for non-financial methods. Investigating five personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and emotional intelligence and their relationship to job performance may provide potentially beneficial methods to improve productivity. These traits are assessed using the big five inventory (Big Five Inventory; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991). Emotional intelligence training and its relationship to job performance may also show potential benefits. Emotional intelligence refers to an individual’s ability to understand emotions within themselves and other people (Mayer and Salovey, 1997).

Dutch company ACME Corporation aims to improve the validity of the hiring policies by examining if the big five personalities of current employees is related to their job performance. They have historically hired their 3500 employees on the basis of handwriting analysis. Since ACME Corporation would like to improve the job performance of incumbent employees through methods outside of simply improving the organization. According to his observations, employees who do well in their jobs have better self and social-awareness, and are better at self and relationship-management. Hence, 100 employees would be tested on how related between emotional intelligence and job performance and whether an emotional intelligence training could lead to a superior job performance.

O’Boyle Jr’s meta-analysis on emotional intelligence and job performance (O’Boyle et. al, 2015) tackles a similar question though with a large sample size. The study suggested that emotional intelligence demonstrated significance importance in predicting job performance. We aim to narrow down that scale to the single firm ACME corporation. Additionally, a study like this has not been previously done in the Netherlands, hence it’s important to see if the case differs in the nation.

The big five inventory traits (Big Five Inventory; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) can improve job performance. Conscientiousness is a basic personality characteristic that represents the propensity to be conscientious, disciplined, hard-working, goal-driven and obedient to standards and rules. It has multiple facets, like the other basic personality traits; conscientiousness requires self-control, laboriousness, accountability, and durability (Roberts, et al. 2009). Furthermore, previous research indicated that conscientiousness has a persistent positive correlation with job performance (Judge, 1999).

In psychology and development, neuroticism is a specific aspect that reflects the degree that a person experiences the environment as distressing, disturbing and dangerous (C. Weed & Kwon, 2019). Neuroticism can affect job performance negatively as it can cause employee job dissatisfaction (Timothy A. & Joyce E., 2001). Agreeableness is a measure of how well a person can get along with other people. Those who are more agreeable tend to be more compassionate and empathetic towards others. Those who rank lower in approval appear to be more honest in their opinions (Graziano, et al., 2009). In the journal “The interactive effects of conscientiousness and agreeableness on job performance”, researchers found out that among the most conscientious employees, those who were weak in agreeableness achieved lower job performance scores than those who were high in agreeableness (Witt, Burke, Barrick & Mount, 2002).

Openness is the degree that people are generally open or sensitive to their life. This research isn’t concerned about relational transparency — being transparent about how to communicate with others — but rather an analytical and experiential openness or receptiveness of new things (Leary, 2018). Additionally, it was explained in previous research that openness can be positively correlated with job performance especially in jobs rich in communication activities (Thoresen, Bradley, Bliese & Thoresen, 2004).

Extraversion is a characteristic that generally explains differences in social interactions, positive emotions, impulsivity, and energy levels between individuals (Fielden, 2015). A worker scores high on extraversion can be an indication of potentially higher job performance, as it’s been positively correlated in previous research (Barrick, Stewart & Piotrowski, 2002).

In this report we are investigating if personality traits and emotional intelligence training can improve job performance. As previous literature did not conduct such studies in the Netherlands corporate world, this research aims to further these concepts and potential correlations in the business world, more specifically within the Netherlands. Consequently, this can affect how organisations assess their employees in the future, which can lead to higher efficiency. The research question is as follows; to what extent do personality traits and emotional intelligence affect job performance? Given previous literature, it’s expected that emotional intelligence training will improve job performance. This is because social awareness and self awareness are critical factors of efficient social interaction and productivity for any organisation, as it can reduce conflict. Therefore, investigation consists of the development and testing of two hypotheses.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1: Openness (H1a), conscientiousness (H1b), extraversion (H1c), and agreeableness (H1d) are positively related to job performance and neuroticism (H1e) is negatively related to job performance

Hypothesis 2: Emotional intelligence training is positively related to job performance

Methodology

This research aims to investigate job performance within the Netherlands, hence the sample for data will derive from the Dutch company ACME corporation. The sample population was obtained through random sampling, resulting in 100 employees out of the total 3500 from ACME Corporation being the sample population. The expectations for the experiment were instructed to the employees orally and through paper, in which they signed to officially state consent. ACME Corporation HR manager acted as an intermediary in informing about this experiment to them, and the employees demonstrated voluntary participation given that they posed no resistance or conflicts. In this sample, there are 46 females and 54 males. Their ages range from 18-52 years old, with an average age of 35.46 years old. Their educational backgrounds consists of intermediate vocational education (1), higher vocational education (2) or academic education (3). In this sample, the mean education was 2.06.

Since there are two objectives; evaluate the personality traits’ correlation with job performance,and improving the validity of the firm’s hiring policies by seeing if emotional intelligence training has an effect on job performance, there will be multiple hypotheses to investigate this.

Hypothesis 1 comprises of five separate hypotheses, where the big five traits, as explained in the introduction, are evaluated. These individual traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. To determine the extent of the employees’ level of these traits, they will be given a survey. Each of the five traits will pose five relevant prompts that the employees can answer which deduces a quantitative value between 1 and 5 as a nominal level of measurement, with 5 being the most significant. This will be used to assess ACME corporation’s current employees’ five factor model personalities. Some items are counter indicative, such as A1, C5, C4, E1, E2, O2 and O5, which means that a greater scale response indicates a more negative personality factor, and these items are marked with a (CI) below. All the items that the employees will respond to are listed in Appendix 1. Every employee’s scores on each personality dimensions are calculated as an average across the concomitant items. This will be seen in the results section of the research paper.

To test emotional intelligence training on job performance, the employees are randomly allocated to the experimental condition or control condition. In the experimental condition, employees will undergo emotional intelligence training. This emotional intelligence training consists of 1 hour sessions per day over five days of emotional intelligence. As explained in the introduction, emotional intelligence training poses many potential benefits to employees, as it can develop relationships with fellow workers, and overall performance (Malouff, John & Thorsteinsson, Einar. 2013). A similar intervention will be replicated, though over fewer days, In the first session employees will face training regarding agreeableness, the next session regarding conscientiousness, the next session about extraversion, the next session regarding neuroticism and finally in the last day they will face training regarding openness.

For the control condition, there will be no training, and employees will perform an activity that’s not expected to alter their job performance. 47 out of the 100 employees will undergo no this control condition. This training will consist of simple memorization questions and arithmetic challenges. The simple memorization questions will ask employees to remember 10 different patterns in 30 seconds, and this will be done three times. Additionally, the arithmetic challenges will comprise of a matrix of nine random numbers between 0 and 10 and respondents will have to find three values which will be as close to 10 as quickly as possible. Likewise, this will be done three times. All employees will receive supervisory job performance ratings before and after both conditions, hence the pretest and posttest. The supervisory board of ACME corporations were contacted and were instructed to evaluate their employees on a nominal scale of 1 to 10. This was done in the form of a survey.

Results

To discuss hypothesis 1, we would look at job performance and how it’s affected by the five traits. The unit of analysis were the 100 employees. To address reliability, Cronbach’s Alpha and a corrected total-item correlation was computed. As the lowest corrected item total correlation value was 0.383 from item 5 in extraversion, and the highest being 0.946 for item 2 in conscientiousness, it’s ideal to delete an item to achieve a higher correlation, which suggested that a control variable is required. Though Cronbach’s Alpha resulted to be high, as the highest value was 0.966 for neuroticism and the lowest value of 0.889 for openness shown in table 1.

Table 2 addresses the correlations between each of the personality traits (independent variable) and job performance (dependent variable). A Pearson correlation value was calculated to evaluate hypothesis 1, which stated that agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness are positively correlated with job performance while neuroticism is negatively correlated.

First, the Pearson correlation values are all positive regarding job performance prior and after the intervention for all means except the NMean. For example for agreeableness, the Pearson correlation prior to the intervention was 0.701, and it’s statistically significant. The values for the rest of the means, except for the NMean, also demonstrate a significant positive correlation with job performance prior and after the emotional intelligence training intervention. We’re able to see that neuroticism has a negative correlation with job performance prior and after the intervention. We see that with a correlation of -0.135 prior to intervention and -0.019 after the intervention. Although these values are negative, they are not significant at the 0.05 level nor 0.01 for the 1-tailed hypothesis, as indicated by the “ * ” and “ ** ” at the bottom of table 2.

Moving on, a regression analysis will demonstrate the joint relationship of multiple variables of our independent variable - the five personality traits - with the dependent variable, job performance. In the table below it’s seen that the R Square accounts for 76.7%, with its adjusted value of 75.5% being the impact on independent variables, combined on job performance. As the significance is 0.000, it supports the alternate hypothesis. Additionally, the multiple R shows the correlation of all independent variables (the five traits) together with job performance, and given that it’s 0.876, it suggests that there is a positive correlation.

To determine whether emotional intelligence training was statistically significant with its positive correlation with job performance, and given that this was a pretest posttest randomized experimental design, ANOVA will aid. The ANOVA analysis describes all the percentage variance that the predictors report for together. In this case it would test hypothesis 2, as it compares the training group and control group on their performances after the intervention, while also controlling for pretest performance. Moving on, the coefficients of the beta values with significance at the table below will be able to generate a formula to predict the dependent variable based on the independent variable. Standardized regression coefficients demonstrates which personality trait has the most significant effect on job performance with respect to overlapping features. Table 5 shows that conscientiousness has the most significant effect. Additionally, the standardized coefficients beta are all positive except for neuroticism, with a value of -0.251. These calculations suggest statistical and significant evidence that hypothesis 1 is supported.

Hypothesis 2 stated that emotional intelligence training (independent variable) is positively related to job performance (dependent variable). Given that the control group and the experimental group didn’t have similar standard deviations (control group having a standard deviation of 1.00175 and experimental group with 0.64859 in table 6), this means that hypothesis 2 has sufficient significance for a statistically probable conclusion. Additionally, the mean score for job performance prior to the intervention is 7.0272 and after the intervention is 7.5645. This indicates that there’s a positive correlation between emotional intelligence training and job performance. Table 7 shows the mean of job performance score prior to intervention for the control and training group. We’re able to see that the control group mean is 7.019 while the experimental group mean is 8.180. It’s also seen that the confidence intervals don’t overlap. This all suggests that there was a difference between the control group and experimental group, supporting construct validity.

Table 8 demonstrates the descriptive statistics when the dependent variable is job performance score after the intervention. It’s seen that the control group had a mean of 6.9937 while the training or experimental group had a mean of 8.2081. To improve reliability, Levene's test was calculated and showed to be significant with. 000. This means that the reliability across the items aren’t similar and there’s variability between groups. This violates the research, however given the high reliability from ANOVA from the large A test square, hypothesis 2 may still be supported. The table below shows the tests of between subject effects and the proportion of causes of scores. It can be seen that the pretest contributes to 20.6% of the variance, with a great significance of 0. Hence, this demonstrates a clear statistical correlation between emotional intelligence training and job performance. Additionally, the emotional intelligence training contributed to 88.9% of the variance, with a significance of 0. Although the variance is high, the alternate hypothesis for Hypothesis 2 still may be supported.