What is the one factor that best predict work performance across occupations and cultures?

Personality traits are relevant for understanding job performance and organizational behavior. The Five-Factor Model (FFM) is the most prominent framework for organizing the range of personality traits studied in the behavioral sciences. Previous meta-analyses suggest the FFM traits are related to a range of work-related variables (Barrick and Mount, 1991, Berry et al., 2007, Chiaburu et al., 2011, Dudley et al., 2006, Hurtz and Donovan, 2000, Judge et al., 2013). A general conclusion from this literature is that conscientiousness is the strongest predictor of job performance among FFM traits for most jobs. Additional studies have tested how FFM traits are related to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and counterproductive behavior (CWB) (Berry et al., 2007, Chiaburu et al., 2011). Altogether, these existing meta-analyses quantify the importance of personality for understanding workplace behavior and outcomes.

One limitation of the existing database, however, is that each meta-analysis primarily focuses on a specific performance outcome. Potential discrepancies across meta-analyses can make it difficult to draw clear conclusions from the overall literature. Thus, there is a need to integrate the existing meta-analyses to provide a summary of this area using second-order meta-analytic techniques (Schmidt & Oh, 2013). These approaches provide overall effect size estimates and quantify heterogeneity across existing first-order meta-analyses to determine whether apparent discrepancies reflect systematic variability or are best attributable to the influence of sampling error.

The current study contributes to the literature about personality and job performance in several ways. First, we provide overall effect size estimates based on existing first-order meta-analyses investigating the validities of FFM personality traits on various job performance criteria. Second, we evaluate whether these validities vary across performance criteria by estimating second-order sampling error (i.e., potentially random error across first-order meta-analyses). Third, we model the unique statistical effects of each FFM personality trait for each performance criterion. Finally, we test whether validity estimates for the FFM traits differ across occupations, sources of ratings, and national cultures. These analyses provide a broad evaluation of potential moderators of the associations between FFM attributes and job-related outcomes.

The value of second-order meta-analysis

A second-order meta-analysis quantitatively summarizes independent first-order meta-analyses (Cooper and Koenka, 2012, Schmidt and Oh, 2013, Young, 2017). In essence, a second-order meta-analysis is a meta-analysis of meta-analyses. A substantial number of first-order personality trait meta-analyses have been reported in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management journals and this number is continuously growing. Given that many

Does the validity of FFM traits and their facets vary across performance criteria?

Job performance is a multifaceted construct and personality traits may differentially relate to many different aspects of job performance. Borman and Motowidlo, 1993, Borman and Motowidlo, 1997 partitioned job performance into task and contextual performance. Task performance refers to the activities that employees perform to contribute to the organization’s technical performance either directly by engaging in technological process, or indirectly by providing necessary services (e.g.,

Searching for first-order meta-analyses

We used Web of Science, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar to search for existing meta-analyses containing the keywords meta-analy* (to meta-analysis and meta-analytic) in combination with other keywords such as performance, Big Five personality, and five-factor model. This step identified 101 meta-analyses to review for potential inclusion in our analysis. The first-order meta-analytic estimates required for our analyses were extracted from these meta-analyses and the sources of all information were

Differential validity across performance criterion types

Five-Factor Model. According to previous first-order meta-analyses, the validities of conscientiousness (ρ = 0.15–0.29), agreeableness (ρ = 0.07–0.23), emotional stability (ρ = 0.06–0.16), openness (ρ = −0.16 to 0.12), and extraversion (ρ = −0.01 to 0.10) vary across job performance criteria. Accordingly, second-order meta-analyses were conducted to examine the extent to which the differences effect size estimates across job performance criteria for FFM personality traits were attributable to

Discussion

The present study reports a series of second-order meta-analyses regarding the associations between FFM attributes and job performance. The second-order approach has the potential to advance knowledge regarding variance in the validities of FFM traits and provides more precise validity estimates by pooling effect sizes across multiple first-order meta-analyses. Thus, the current work is an integration of previous meta-analyses and an important extension of those studies. First, by adopting the

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