As hiring costs rise and staffing shortages persist across a variety of industries, many employers are rethinking the way they approach hiring decisions. In a recent article, we explored the rising use of competency-based measures to evaluate prospective employees. We noted that this trend represents an evolution–in the way that employers think about the evaluation of candidates and employees.
Employers are beginning to look beyond traditional tools like academic credentials, resumes, and interviews to predict job performance. Underlying this evolution is an important assumption–personality can be used to predict job performance.
But is this true? Can personality predict performance?
We believe so, and we also believe there is a great deal of valid evidence from reputable sources to support this belief. We also believe it’s possible to introduce testing tools that can highlight the connections between personality and job performance, with certain caveats.
A Disclaimer About Using Personality to Predict Job Performance
Let’s establish an important point right from the outset. Personality is just one potential predictor of job performance. Hiring decisions should never be made using only a single predictor. Personality must be factored alongside experience, formal qualifications, credentials, and cognitive abilities.
Anything less magnifies the risk of making a poor hire, overlooking a qualified candidate, or imposing unintentional bias on your own hiring process. So when we investigate this pressing question–whether or not personality can predict job performance–it should always be considered within this context.
When you’re putting together the portrait of an ideal candidate, even the most reliable measures of personality must be viewed as pieces of a much bigger picture. Still, there are a few things we can confidently say as we proceed:
- There is absolutely a proven correlation between personality and job performance.
- Certain personality traits have shown a higher correlation with job performance than others.
- Tools which can reliably measure this correlation can have value, alongside other measures and sources, in predicting job performance.
In the discussion that follows, we’ll highlight some recent findings on the subject that help to root these claims.
The Persistence of Personality
This discussion is precipitated first and foremost on the assumption that personality is correlated to job performance. A 2023 article from Kang et al states in no uncertain terms that “personality relates to employment status.” The study, published in the scholarly journal Frontiers in Psychology, cites a robust recent history of research confirming this claim.
- Kang et al note that a recent litany of “criterion-related validity studies” (Ones et al., 2007; Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham, 2010) support the idea that personality plays a role in predicting employee performance.
- The article also notes that there is an established history of literature (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Hurtz and Donovan, 2000; Barrick et al., 2001) supporting a strong and direct relationship between personality and job performance across all job types, managerial levels, and performance outcomes.
- Kang et al also point out that more recent studies have successfully established links between personality and entrepreneurial ambition.
Attraction-Selection-Attrition
Kang et al also direct our attention to an important 1987 study by Benjamin Schneider. Originally published in Personnel Psychology, Schneider’s study explained the correlation between personality and job performance through a framework he dubbed the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle.
The ASA theory holds that the correlation between personality and job performance is rooted in three probabilities:
- Attraction: Candidates are naturally attracted to jobs that suit their personality;
- Selection: Employers are more likely to choose candidates with personalities that are compatible with company culture and given positions; and
- Attrition: Employees who are a poor personality fit for their role will be more likely to leave said role.
Schneider would ultimately conclude that there is a “need for person-based theories of leadership and job attitudes” in hiring. But perhaps even more importantly for our purposes, he would observe that “organizations are functions of the kinds of people they contain.”
This is a grounding principle of our discussion. It isn’t simply that personality is correlated to individual job performance. The research suggests that personality is actually a defining feature of your workplace.
But exactly how does personality correlate to areas like job performance and organizational culture? Researchers have offered a number of different frameworks to help define these correlations. Among the most popular frameworks is The Five Factor Model.
The Five Factor Model
The Five Factor Model distills workplace performance into what it calls The Big Five Personality Traits.
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
This is a commonly used model in both academic settings and in real-world personality assessments. There is relative consensus that these traits have some correlation to likely job performance as well as to the suitability of candidates for different potential team, managerial, or leadership roles.
However, the exact nature of that correlation is a matter which is subject to constant exploration, debate, and nuance.
The Preeminence of Conscientiousness
Kang et al, for instance, cite a number of prior studies in concluding that higher Conscientiousness and lower Neuroticism generally correlate to higher job performance in most roles. In contrast, the importance of Extraversion, Openness, and Agreeableness may depend more on the context of a given role.
A recent study by Iliescu et al echoes these findings. Published in the Journal on Personality and Individual Differences, the 2023 article investigates the correlation between the Big Five Personality Traits and three important criteria: job performance, voluntary turnover, and career progression.
In their research, Iliescu et al find “that conscientiousness is the best predictor across the three criteria, with extraversion and agreeableness emerging as rather weak incremental predictors over general mental ability in some settings.”
Ultimately though, the researchers also conclude that cognitive ability is actually the best overall predictor of both job performance and career advancement. This underscores an important point that we’ve made in the past and will continue to make here and in the future. Personality assessment is most valuable when used alongside other assessment tools.
Conscientious Objectors
To drive home the importance of the point above, we’ll note that there is even disagreement over just how universal conscientiousness is a predictor of job performance. An editorial from the American Psychological Association (APA) points out that “One research camp argues that conscientiousness—being responsible, dependable, organized, and persistent—is generic to success” whereas another camp holds that conscientiousness may actually be an impediment in certain creative fields.
According to the APA article, some researchers argue that conscientiousness may actually inhibit individuals working in “investigative, artistic, and social jobs that require innovation, creativity, and spontaneity.”
Our goal in this article is not to decipher who among these researchers is correct. To the contrary, we would argue that these disagreements are valuable. These disagreements demonstrate that personality can be a useful predictive tool when used alongside other methods of evaluation like cognitive assessments, academic credentials, resume, references, and interview performance.
As we’ll discuss in the section below, there is clear predictive value to personality assessment, but there are also clear limitations to its predictive power.
Limitations of Personality as a Predictor of Job Performance
Some of the following are possible limitations of personality as a predictor of job performance:
Self-reporting
Many personality assessments depend on self-reporting instruments. Self-reporting is limited by the reliability of the respondent, who may be unconsciously or consciously inclined to answer questions in ways that they believe will be seen as most favorable rather than most honest.
Bias
As we note in our recent article on the ethics of personality assessment in hiring, some methods of personality assessment can carry inherent and unseen bias. This is why any hiring sequence which uses personality assessment as part of the screening process must first operate within the parameters set forth by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Uniform Guidelines.
Scope
The scope of your personality assessment is consequential. Using an assessment framework that is too narrow can cause you to overlook otherwise qualified candidates. Using an assessment framework that is too broad can prevent you from gaining any truly meaningful insights into individual candidates. Your assessment tool should provide nuanced scoring and reporting on candidates.
Situational Factors
Personality is absolutely correlated to job performance. But it’s important to remember that numerous other factors are also correlated to job performance. As our research notes above, cognitive ability is a valuable predictor of performance, as are individual skill sets, on-the-job experience, specialized training, and specific work environment.
Oversimplification
Personality testing by itself can’t capture the full range of complexities that apply to individual talents, behavior, job situations, and organizational context. Personality assessment is simply not meant to be used as a standalone predictor of job performance..
Using personality assessment responsibly
The preceding discussion is not specifically about whether or not personality assessment tools are effective at predicting job performance. This discussion is more broadly about the concept of personality, and whether personality is a useful predictor of job performance.
Indeed, as the research shows, personality does correlate to job performance, and can be a useful predictor of job performance. And by extension, our discussion does suggest that there is value in using personality assessment tools in the employee assessment process, provided that personality tests:
- Have been built in consultation with EEOC guidelines;
- Provide evaluation of candidates across a broad range of relevant traits;
- Are used as part of a holistic assessment process that includes other assessment tools such as cognitive ability tests, interviews, and work portfolios; and
- Measure the unique fitness of individual candidates for specific roles and working dynamics.
Measuring the Fitness of Individual Candidates for Specific Roles
With regard to this last criteria, Success Portraits is developing a new Team Building reporting tool that is designed to do exactly that by tailoring our Success Portraits Personality
Test (SPPT) to pinpoint correlations between personality scoring and predefined O*NET “Work Styles”.
O*NET Work Styles is a framework created by the U.S. Department of Labor that outlines the key personal attributes and work styles crucial for success in various occupations. By leveraging this massive database, Success Portraits is developing the capability to provide a more nuanced look at how each trait—whether it’s dependability, self-control, or adaptability—affects team dynamics, decision-making, and overall productivity.
The O*NET team building tool is still a work in progress. But the objective is to create an assessment tool that is flexible, nuanced, and capable of evaluating applicants without forcing them into narrow personality types. This tool, and the Success Portraits Personality Test, operate from a few basic assumptions.
In the simplest of terms, context matters, job fit matters, and the comprehensiveness of your hiring process matters. It may be possible to use personality as a predictor of job performance provided these conditions are taken into consideration first.