The Welfare Trait

by Adam Perkins

  In other words, an individual who is highly motivated to work for a living, possesses sound judgement and can interact successfully with colleagues will, in a typical job, perform as well or better than a more intelligent individual with a less functional personality profile performs. This idea has been backed up by research in the USA by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and colleagues that has investigated the life outcomes of people who drop out of high school but then go on to pass the general educational development (GED) test. The GED test is an examination that lasts for seven hours 30 minutes and is intended to give individuals who have dropped out of high school a second chance to prove they possess the knowledge they would have acquired if had they completed high school. What these studies have found is that people who pass the GED test are on average as intelligent as high-school graduates (who do not go on to college) but that GED recipients on average turn out to be less successful in the workplace than high-school graduates because of the same personality characteristics that caused them to drop out of high school.

  According to Heckman and Rubinstein,

  Inadvertently, a test has been created that separates out bright but non-persistent and undisciplined dropouts from other dropouts. It is, then, no surprise that GED recipients are the ones who drop out of school, fail to complete college (Stephen Cameron and James Heckman, 1993) and who fail to persist in the military (Janice Laurence, 2000). GED’s are ‘wiseguys’, who lack the abilities to think ahead, to persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments. The performance of the GED recipients compared to both high-school dropouts of the same ability and high-school graduates demonstrates the importance of noncognitive skills in economic life.

  (Heckman & Rubenstein, 2001, p. 146)

  Viewed as a whole, these results have been interpreted by Heckman and colleagues as showing that ‘Although the GED establishes cognitive equivalence on one measure of scholastic aptitude, recipients still face limited opportunity due to deficits in noncognitive skills such as persistence, motivation and reliability’ (Heckman, Humphries & Mader, 2010, p. 2).

  In stark terms, these studies of GED outcomes support the idea that, in many cases, being persistent and motivated is more important for occupational success than being smart. In the context of welfare legislation, I argue that this finding by Heckman and colleagues means that, since there are jobs to suit many different levels of intelligence, a person who is highly motivated to work is likely to attain a solid employment record regardless of their intelligence level by simply rising up or trickling down to whatever level of job complexity suits their level of intelligence.

  A poor employment record is therefore not so much the result of inadequate intelligence but more an inadequate motivation to turn up on time, do what the boss says, speak politely to colleagues, behave helpfully towards customers and so on. Likewise, in harsh economic times when good jobs are difficult to find, a highly intelligent person who is also highly motivated to work might well swallow their pride and take a job that is well below their usual intellectual level in order to maintain a continuous work record. In contrast, an equally intelligent person with weaker motivation to work may plead that they are over-qualified and fall back on claiming welfare instead of working.

  In line with this idea, Daly, Delaney and Egan (2015) studied a sample of 16,676 UK citizens that had been measured on self-control during childhood. Self-control measured in childhood approximates to a measure of conscientiousness and agreeableness in adulthood and their results were telling: children with low levels of self-control went on to suffer the greatest increases in unemployment during economic downturns.

  This brings us to a crucial point about personality and work motivation that needs to be emphasised at this stage in my argument. The point is that, whereas we cannot boost our intelligence level by being more motivated, we can choose to be more or less conscientious and agreeable than we usually are if we are given sufficient motivation to do so.

  Another way of visualising this is to say that we analyse the costs and benefits of behaving in a particular way in a particular situation and can switch to whichever personality strategy gives us the biggest pay-off in a particular situation. For example, if a cold-calling salesperson telephones us at an inconvenient moment, it is plausible that we would react differently than if our boss did the same thing. We are equally annoyed in both cases at being interrupted, but the costs and benefits of showing our annoyance are very different in the two situations: when we are replying to our boss, the likely high cost of offending him/her (for example, being fired or being passed over for promotion) means it is probable that we would react more agreeably to him/her than to the salesperson, who has no hold over us.

  But, and this is important to understand, our perception of the size of a pay-off provided by a given strategy in a given situation is itself influenced by our personalities. This might sound confusing, but all it means is that a person who scores relatively low on conscientiousness requires a larger pay-off to motivate him or her to behave conscientiously compared to a person who scores relatively high on conscientiousness. Likewise, a person who scores relatively low on agreeableness requires a larger pay-off to motivate him or her to behave in an agreeable, cooperative manner compared to a person who scores relatively high on agreeableness.

  As an illustration of this point, here are some thought experiments. First, with regard to conscientiousness, imagine you can win £1 by correctly counting the number of grains in a 10-kg bag of rice. Now imagine the same scenario except that you will now win £1,000,000 for a correct answer. In the first scenario, it is easy to imagine that the average person would be unlikely to count the rice carefully, since the financial pay-off for all that hard work is so small. In the second scenario, we are likely to have much greater motivation to count every grain carefully, taking weeks if necessary, in order to ensure that the pay-off of £1,000,000 is obtained.

  The effect of motivation on agreeableness can also be illustrated with a thought experiment: imagine you have two colleagues in the same role as you, but they are both much less experienced than you are (for example, you are in a service-industry job involving the use of a specialist and very tricky-to-use computer software package). Colleague A is an easy-going, likeable person who has a good sense of humour, is fun to be around and who always behaves politely and respectfully towards you. Colleague B is a horrible person who is rude, humourless, bossy and uncooperative, and generally makes everyone’s life a misery. Colleague A realises his lack of experience with the software is hindering his career and asks politely if you could spare a few hours during the weekend to coach him on the software. Colleague B also realises this, but instead of asking you politely for some coaching, he shouts at you across the work canteen: ‘Hey Loser! Cancel your weekend plans – if you have any – because I need you to coach me on that software.’ It is easy to imagine that most of us would be more inclined to agree to help Colleague A than Colleague B. Now imagine that you refuse to help the nasty colleague, only for him to return shortly afterwards to your office, make a grovelling apology for his obnoxious behaviour and explain that it is a reaction to his only child being desperately ill. He then offers you £1,000 cash in return for some coaching on the software. Would you soften your stance and agree to his request for help now?

  If we apply these thought experiments, trivial though they may seem, to thinking about the effects of personality on work performance, we can see in very approximate terms that the higher a person’s score on conscientiousness, the lower the extrinsic motivation they require to work conscientiously at a boring, detail-focused task like counting grains of rice. But also, our levels of conscientiousness in any one situation are open to manipulation by the pay-offs available. Thus, a hypothetical super-conscientious person may indeed count the grains of rice in the 10-kg bag carefully for a reward of only £1. But the offer of £1,000,000 for a correct count is likely (temporarily) to transform an average person into a super-conscient
ious rice-counter. Likewise, the higher a person’s score on agreeableness, the lower the extrinsic motivation they require to be helpful and cooperative: a hypothetical super-agreeable person may indeed help the nasty colleague without needing an apology or a cash reward, yet it is plausible that the offer of £1,000 for a few hours work will temporarily turn an average person into a super-agreeable colleague.

  The crucial point to realise here is that a person with relatively low scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness is able to behave diligently and cooperatively, but will only do so when subject to some suitable powerful extrinsic incentive, such as the fear of destitution. If a welfare state is implemented that removes the fear of destitution, it can be viewed as a noble thing, but it is also a personality filter, preferentially stripping the workforce of those individuals with low levels of work motivation who, in pre-welfare eras, would have bitten the proverbial bullet, suppressed their antisocial urges and buckled down to the challenge of working for a living. Figure 2.1 illustrates this process using a simple diagram.

  The notion of the welfare state as a personality filter is corroborated by studies showing that individuals with aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality attributes that characterise the employment-resistant personality profile are over-represented amongst welfare claimants. For example, Markowe, Tonge and Barber (1955) analysed the psychiatric qualities of 222 British men registered as disabled for psychiatric reasons, 95 of whom were unemployed. The group of unemployed men contained significantly more individuals with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder (as defined by an interview with a psychiatrist) than the group of employed men, 26 versus 9. In a similar vein, New Zealand children with antisocial personality traits have a higher risk than average of turning out to be unemployed adults (Caspi et al., 1998).

  Figure 2.1 The personality-filtering process triggered by the implementation of the welfare state

  Data from the USA tell a similar story: a survey of a large and nationally representative sample of 43,093 adults found antisocial personality disorder was associated with a significantly increased risk of claiming welfare support (Vaughn et al., 2010). This latter finding is backed up by more recent research by James Heckman and colleagues on the characteristics of GED recipients (high-school dropouts who have subsequently passed the GED high-school equivalency test). For example, when compared to high-school graduates, adults who dropped out of high school but then went on to pass the GED test were already displaying as children a significantly greater frequency of un-conscientious and disagreeable behaviours (for example, truancy, binge drinking, theft and criminal violence; Heckman, Humphries & Kautz, 2014a).

  Importantly for the argument that personality affects employment prospects and thus welfare usage, follow-up studies show that GED recipients also tend to have significantly worse work records and a significantly increased risk of claiming welfare support compared to high-school graduates, despite possessing equal intelligence (Heckman, Humphries & Kautz, 2014b). The research on GEDs suggests that a personality-related deficit in work motivation, rather than a lack of intelligence, underpins the tendency to claim welfare benefits. It also suggests that the relationship between personality and employability differs sharply from that between intelligence and employability because intelligence is an ability rather than a strategy and so cannot be increased to maximise pay-offs. For example, if intelligence was influenced by motivation, then the huge financial and status pay-offs that accompany the very highest levels of professional performance in cognitively demanding jobs such as investment banking might be expected to enable success in people with low intelligence but high motivation to succeed. This is not the case, as studies show that the very highest levels of professional performance are only accessible to people with extremely high levels of intelligence. In other words, intelligence is a gift that keeps on giving, in that there appears to be no threshold effect on intelligence when it comes to aiding job performance: in jobs at the higher end of the complexity spectrum, the super-smart perform better than the merely smart, but are themselves outperformed by the ‘scary smart’ (Kell, Lubinski & Benbow, 2013).

  If we now return to the occupational psychology literature, why was there a delay in studying personality effects in the workplace? As Barrick et al. (2001) wrote in their review of studies testing personality effects on job performance, there are two distinct phases to this form of psychology. The first ran from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s and essentially concluded that there is no effect of personality on job performance. The second phase has been running from the mid-1980s onwards and shows that personality has an important influence on our effectiveness in the workplace.

  Barrick et al. (2001) cite many reasons for this, but the main reason was that personality measurement has only attained a mature state in the last 30 years or so: before this time, researchers seeking to test for effects of personality on job performance simply did not have adequate, easy-to-use measurement tools to accomplish their goals. All that was available was a plethora of poorly constructed and poorly validated personality questionnaires, often measuring hundreds of trivial, poorly replicated traits. These questionnaires typically showed little consistency, measuring personality constructs that had low reliability and confusing naming protocols. Nor were the questionnaires systematically validated using biological or physiological measures, with the result that researchers had little idea whether the questionnaire they were using really measured what it purported to measure, other than by the circular and uninformative process of correlating the scores with another questionnaire (Barrick et al., 2001).

  This woeful situation began to change in the 1940s, largely due to the prescient work of Hans Eysenck, who advocated representing inter-individual personality variance with a handful of reliable, genetically and biologically-based personality dimensions (firstly extraversion and neuroticism; Eysenck, 1947, then psychoticism; Eysenck, 1952). Ignoring decades of ridicule by other psychologists who argued there were no such things as personality traits (for example, Mischel, 1968), Eysenck doggedly continued to construct questionnaires that reliably captured robust individual differences in underlying biological processes, arguing that whilst the three dimensions may not capture all the variance in personality, attempting to measure personality with hundreds of narrow, non-replicated, overly-detailed constructs (or not measuring it at all) was foolish.

  Eventually, by the 1980s, most personality researchers had seen the wisdom of Eysenck’s notion of capturing personality variation with a small number of fundamental dimensions, and began copying the Eysenckian dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism as well as refining psychoticism to form two sub-dimensions, namely conscientiousness and agreeableness (Digman, 1990; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1993). As was mentioned in Chapter 1, this five-factor model of personality, usually known in the personality industry as the big five, has proved to be measurable by questionnaire and useful in studies attempting to probe the effects of personality on workplace performance.

  Due to these advances in personality measurement, effects of personality (as measured by personality questionnaires) on occupational outcomes have been investigated in scores of studies over two decades now and show that conscientiousness is the heavy hitter in occupational settings, being positively correlated with performance in most jobs (Barrick et al., 2001). A statement of the obvious perhaps, given that it is difficult to imagine a job in which performance would be improved by being sloppy, unreliable and irresponsible, yet it is reassuring to have data to show this outcome.

  Moreover, it seems that conscientiousness is already influencing an individual’s employability before they even enter the workforce. For example, conscientiousness is positively correlated with academic performance (for example, Poropat, 2009) so it is plausible that high scorers on conscientiousness are primed for good job performance before they even arrive in the workplace, by tending to work harder at school and so be better qualified and skilled once they enter th
e workforce. As a caveat, it should be noted that there are a tiny minority of specialist occupations where high conscientiousness is likely to hinder performance: for example, it is plausible that an individual with the careful, rule-following, conformist, detail-focused attitude typical of a high scorer on conscientiousness will lack the off-beat, free-wheeling, ‘big-picture’ world view needed to be a creative genius. But the reality is that for society to function, we need far fewer creative geniuses than ordinary workers. Therefore, on the whole, we can accept that conscientiousness is crucial in boosting workplace performance.

  Occupational psychologists have been slower to appreciate the importance of agreeableness in the workplace: it usually shows no significant relationship with direct measures of job performance or occasionally even a slight negative relationship (Judge et al., 1999). Indeed, it is easy to see that in some jobs, high agreeableness may be a disadvantage. For example, it is likely that a highly agreeable police officer will manage violent public disorder situations less effectively than a low scorer on agreeableness will. Likewise, a person at the high end of the agreeableness scale is unlikely to be effective as an officer commanding a platoon of infantry soldiers in combat. But for every leader there must, by definition, be many more subordinates who readily cooperate with the orders of their boss and the aims of the organisation, so for the vast majority of jobs, it is plausible that medium to high agreeableness is in general beneficial for workplace effectiveness.

  This idea has been backed up by advances in occupational psychology that go beyond evaluating personality effects on individual measures of job performance, such as absolute sales figures or widgets produced, and instead test personality effects on behaviours that facilitate organisational cohesion. These thoughts have crystallised into an appreciation of what is known as organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). This construct has been defined as ‘individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization’ (Organ, 1988, p. 4). Within the overall construct of OCB, five major facets have been identified consisting of altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, civic virtue and sportsmanship (Organ, 1988). Of these five facets, altruism, courtesy and sportsmanship plausibly relate to agreeableness. This idea has been backed up by studies showing agreeableness is positively related to organisational citizenship (Podsakoff et al., 2000).