Is Personality really irrelevant?😳 | (Big Five Personality Factors and Career Success)

why on earth are the big five personality factors such bad predictors of work performance i mean almost everybody would agree that personality is very important in your job but surprisingly one of the biggest meta-analysis that have been conducted until now could show that in comparison for example to intelligence tests in comparison to tests of general mental ability the big five personality factors are really bad predictors of work performance they predict very bad if somebody will do a great job or if you will do a poor job so if you take a look at the numbers general mental ability correlates with work performance on average at about 0.65 and if you compare this really high correlation with the correlation of the best predictor of the big five for work performance which is conscientiousness which correlates at r equals to 0.22 and the other personality factors are even worse so for example emotional stability correlates at about r equals to 0.12 extra version 0.09 agreeableness 0.0.08 and openness to experiences even 0.04 so you see in comparison to intelligence tests the correlation between personality factors and work performance is very weak to almost not existent but why is that i mean almost everybody would agree that personality is very important for your job so these results are almost unbelievable well there are at least three quite good explanations first of all it varies with the job so in some jobs for example if we're talking about nurses or if we talk about sales persons or if we talk about managers for people who are almost all the time have to work with other people and who have to get along with other people for those kinds of jobs the predictive validity the prognostic power of the big five is already higher whereas on the other hand if you are for example working in the factory on an assembly line and you are almost never talking to anybody or if you are driving a truck all day long then your personality is not really that important in fact there are some jobs in which your personality doesn't matter at all for example if you are a programmer or something like that and you interact with other people only once a month then of course it doesn't matter how agreeable you are or how extroverted the second explanation is that the correlation between personality factors and work performance is not always linear so for example think about the factor emotional stability in which you can also find how fearful somebody is and sometimes to some degree it can be quite helpful to have no anxiety at all so for example if you're a manager it can be quite helpful to go into negotiations with other company managers without any anxiety but on the other hand if you're completely fearless if you are afraid of nothing at all and you say well we can do that everything is possible and well let's buy this company it will work out perfectly if you don't have any second thoughts about that and if you don't have any worries about that that something might go wrong well then you might fail some decisions that are actually quite bad for your company and it's the same with extra version of course there are many situations in which it can be quite helpful that you are entertaining for other people and that you are able to speak freely and that you like to be at the center of attention but sometimes it can also be too much for example if all of your co-workers are very focused and all of a sudden you begin to sing or if you try to entertain everybody of course this can also be counterproductive so the correlation between big five personality factors is not always linear but sometimes it's curvy linear and that's another reason why the correlation between personality and work performance is not that high or not as high as we might expect the third and last reason is that the big five personality factors aren't quite global they are not specific for work performance and actually if you take a look at questionnaires that are very specific for work performance like for example in germany we have the bip which is really focused on your personality that you need for your work for example it's about how good you are at teamwork or how good you are in other social competences that are really important for the workplace and how strong is your achievement motivation and if you take a look at those personality factors you can find much higher correlations between personality and work performance but nevertheless the correlations are still not that high as those for general mental ability which still is the best predictor for work performance even though you also have to keep in mind how complex a job is so for example if you're driving a truck then you don't need a general mental ability that is that high whereas if you're a professor for mathematics for example of course then you need very high general mental ability that's it for today if you enjoyed this episode and you found it a little bit helpful feel free to give it a 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