Practical Benefits of Using the Big Five Model of Personality in Organisations 

Despite the existence of many personality models, a Five Factor Approach started gaining substantial popularity and prominence since around mid-1980s. You can take the Big 5 personality test for free on the Psyculator platform. Broadly, the Five Factor Approach is the belief that human personality can be organised by only five broad factors, typically labelled as Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, which is sometimes called Emotional Stability (Block, 1995, 2001; John & Srivastava, 1999). These broad factors are associated with more specific personality characteristics (i.e. measuring a single aspect), often denoted as personality facets. The most popular framework here is the Five Factor Model (FFM; Costa & McCrae, 1992a), commonly referred to as Big Five, which includes 30 low-order personality facets (i.e. six facets per broad factor). For example, Neuroticism is associated with such personality facets as anxiety and anger; Conscientiousness measures self-discipline and planfulness; Agreeableness includes altruism and empathy; Extraversion is used to assess gregariousness and sociability; and Openness generally measures the extent to which someone is open to new experiences. 

A substantial body of research has shown that personality can predict job performance. For example, Conscientiousness, the strongest personality predictor of job performance in a wide range of occupations demonstrated the following predictive correlates across a number of meta-analyses: .18 (Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991); .22 (Barrick & Mount,1991); .24 (Hurtz & Donovan,2000) .26 (Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, & Crawford, 2013). In other words, Conscientiousness explained no more than 6.8 per cent of variance in job performance. While it might not look excessive, it is worth noting that after the IQ (known as the strongest predictor of job performance), the Big Five personality factors have the second strongest predictive power when it comes to job outcomes. It is important to note that personality has incremental predictive power over the IQ too. This means that a certain proportion of job performance that is explained by personality can no longer be explained by employees’ intellectual prowess. 

Even more interesting is the whole body of research that shows that Personality can explain many critical organisational metrics other than job performance. For example, a large number of meta-analyses have shown that personality is still an important predictor 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), organisational commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002), organisational justice (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001), and counter-productive workplace behaviour (Grijalva & Newman, 2015).

Other meta-analytic studies demonstrated the importance of personality assessments for predicting both positive and negative leadership styles (Bono & Judge, 2004; Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Van Engen, 2003). In terms of the latter, personality assessments are useful psychometric tools for identifying destructive leaders, whose actions have a negative impact on organisations (e.g. Babiak & Hare, 2006; Campbell, Hoffman, Campbell, & Marchisio, 2011; Mathieu, Hare, Jones, Babiak, & Neumann, 2013). That is, a growing body of organisational research has linked destructive leadership with workplace bullying (e.g. Boddy, 2005, 2010, 2015; Mattice & Spitzberg, 2007), with a recent study showing that in a US-based sample of working individuals, psychopathic and narcissistic leadership styles explained as much as 41 per cent and 25 per cent variance in workplace bullying, and up to 20 per cent variance in employee depression (Tokarev, Phillips, Hughes, & Irwing, 2017). This has substantial costs to the economy, as in the UK alone, organisational costs of workplace bullying were estimated to range from four to four and a half billion pounds per annum in the form of lost productivity and law-suits (Rayner, 1997; Sheehan, 1999). In fact, the problem of workplace bullying so persistent that Einarsen (1999) claimed that “Bullying at work … is a more crippling and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stress put together” (p.2).