by Adam Perkins
The crucial point to understand with the altruistic component of OCB is that helping behaviours add up over time to the advantage of the organisation even if there is no measurable gain in every case of such behaviour (Organ, Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 2006). In a very simple form we see that high conscientiousness gives a benefit to what might be dubbed ‘contracted’ workplace performance (for example, turning up for work on time or sticking to procedures). Agreeableness, in contrast, plays a key role in what might be labelled the ‘non-contracted’ aspects of performance that are less easily measured yet help an organisation to function (that is, the tendency to cooperate with co-workers and to help them do their jobs without being ordered to do so, taking care to avoid needless confrontations with co-workers or customers and so on).
Finally, recent research has shown that like conscientiousness, agreeableness may even be boosting our employability before we get into the workplace, as it is not only positively correlated with academic performance (Poropat, 2009), but it also helps us get hired (Hogan, 2011). In other words, it doesn’t matter how conscientious we are, if we habitually display a confrontational, difficult or otherwise disagreeable manner, we may suffer in school and in the job interview situation, making the employer unlikely to choose to hire us.
Viewed as a whole, these three parts of the scientific literature allow us to visualise conscientiousness and agreeableness as coalescing to form a hybrid dimension of personality that could be dubbed ‘employability’. At the high end of this dimension, we find individuals who score significantly above average on both conscientiousness and agreeableness (labelled as C+, A+ in standard personality notation). Individuals with this personality profile not only display strong intrinsic motivation to work diligently, but also to be polite, cooperative and helpful in their dealings with other people. These individuals therefore tend to be model employees in the workplace and solid citizens in the community.
At the low end of the hybrid dimension of employability, we find individuals who score significantly below average on both conscientiousness and agreeableness (labelled as C–, A– in standard personality notation). These individuals not only display weak motivation to work diligently, but are also relatively unlikely to cooperate constructively with others. They can therefore be viewed as possessing what I have called the ‘employment-resistant’ personality profile.
As a sanity check of studies showing that conscientiousness and agreeableness influence employability, it should be noted that Li Ka-Shing (Asia’s richest person) emphasises both conscientiousness and agreeableness in his advice on how to succeed in the world of work: ‘If you keep a good reputation, work hard, be nice to people, keep your promises, your business will be much easier.’ Moreover, Ka-Shing’s recipe for success is not hindsight, because in the 1960s, before he became famous in the wider world, he was already well known in the plastics industry as a particularly conscientious and agreeable man: ‘When I did business with K. S. (Ka-Shing) we didn’t need a contract. All it was was a handshake’ (Alan Hassenfeld, Chairman of Hasbro).
Figure 2.2 Employability as a function of the combined scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness in 2,532 UK adults
To estimate the prevalence of the employment-resistant personality profile, Figure 2.2 plots questionnaire scores for conscientiousness and agreeableness in 2,532 UK adults from one of my own studies. The arrow indicates the hybrid dimension of employability. The dashed lines contain those who scored significantly below average on both conscientiousness and agreeableness (defined as scoring one standard deviation or more below the mean). These 103 people (four percent) possess the employment-resistant personality profile. It should be noted that all of the 2,532 participants whose scores are plotted in Figure 2.2 were volunteers and so the employment-resistant personality profile is likely to be under-represented in this sample, since volunteering to participate in a psychological study is itself an act of conscientiousness and agreeableness.
Conclusion
The evidence summarised in this chapter shows that the lower a person scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness, the less employable they tend to be. The employment-resistant personality profile can therefore be viewed as combining relatively low scores on both conscientiousness and agreeableness.
3
The Lifelong Impact of Personality
The previous chapter showed that people who combine relatively low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to have unsatisfactory work records, irrespective of their intelligence level. These individuals can therefore be viewed as possessing the ‘employment-resistant’ personality profile.
A major question that stems from this conclusion is whether the employment-resistant personality profile is the cause rather than the product of adverse occupational experiences. For example, the arrow of causation might be bidirectional, with low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness not only increasing the risk of unemployment, but also being a product of unemployment. Studies on this theme have found mixed evidence: for example, Specht, Egloff and Schmukle (2011) found no significant effect of unemployment on conscientiousness and agreeableness in a sample of 14,718 German participants. However, Boyce et al. (2015) studied 6,769 participants, also German, and found that although there were no direct effects of unemployment on conscientiousness or agreeableness, when sex was taken into account, a more complex picture emerged: agreeableness increased in men but decreased in women due to unemployment. The authors also identified a trend for conscientiousness to decline over time in unemployed men and, in women, they found a trend for conscientiousness to rise in participants unemployed for one and four years, whilst tending to fall in those participants unemployed for two and three years.
The studies of people who have suffered prefrontal brain injuries that we covered in the previous chapter go some way to supporting the idea that low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness cause unemployment because victims of this sort of injury typically display a post-injury reduction in conscientiousness and agreeableness and at the same time display a reduction in employability. However, people with prefrontal brain injuries have suffered severe neurological trauma that means a causal role for conscientiousness and agreeableness in employability needs to be backed up by studies in non-brain-injured people. The programme of research on GED recipients that has been undertaken by James Heckman and colleagues hints that personality deficits cause later employment problems by showing that GED recipients display more antisocial behaviour as children and claim more welfare as adults, compared to individuals who go on to graduate from high school. But this research does not track the same individuals over time, instead taking a cross-sectional sample of data on the behaviour of children and the employment records of GED recipients, who are not the same people as those children.
To be sure that the employment-resistant personality profile truly is the cause rather than the product of poor occupational outcomes, we require so-called longitudinal studies that record personality characteristics in childhood and then trace the effects of these characteristics on subsequent outcomes in the same individuals during adulthood, whilst controlling for the effect of other important variables (for example, intelligence and SES). Studies of this type are rare as they are more difficult and expensive than cross-sectional research, in which we administer a personality questionnaire and measure the relationship between its scores and some easily procured measure of job performance (for example, supervisor ratings). Longitudinal studies are also rare because they take decades to do and so are not attractive to scientists, who usually want to do studies that provide quick results that can boost their career whilst they are still young enough to benefit. Few researchers are selfless enough to spend a lifetime tracking their participants only to die and have their glory taken by younger co-workers.
Nevertheless, longitudinal studies that record personality effects on life outcomes have been done, two of which are particularly rigorous and so are the focus of this chapter. Fir
st, I will describe Lewis Terman’s study which from 1921 started tracking the lives of 1,528 Californian children born around 1910. Almost all of these children are now dead and so their full life trajectory is available for study, with follow-up surveys revealing that children with employment-resistant personality profiles generally turned out to have worse work records than average (for an overview of the entire research programme, see Friedman & Martin, 2011). Interestingly, the children with employment-resistant personality profiles also went on to have worse health, personal relationships and longevity than average children. Terman only enrolled highly intelligent children from middle-class or upper-middle-class families and so he eliminated intelligence effects, but this step also caused a limitation: the personality effects that were found in the Terman Study might just be quirks of the higher echelons of society. For example, conscientiousness effects on life outcomes may only be relevant in people who are intelligent enough to be eligible for high-flying jobs.
Second, I will describe a more recent investigation known as the Dunedin Study which has been following the lives of approximately 1,000 people born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in 1972. The key innovation of this study is that it enrolled every baby born in Dunedin in that year and so the participant groups were not pre-selected on any variable such as IQ or social class. The cohort therefore contains a much wider and more representative sample of humanity than was found in the Terman Study. This study also used a different measure of childhood personality, namely the hybrid construct of self-control (which combines conscientiousness and agreeableness). Despite these differences, the Dunedin Study has so far backed up the results of the Terman Study: individuals with low levels of self-control as children go on to have less satisfactory life histories in almost every important domain, including work, compared to highly self-controlled children.
The Terman Study of the Gifted (often known as the Terman Study)
Born in 1877 in Indiana, Lewis Terman received his PhD in 1905 from Clark University then worked as a schoolteacher in California before, in 1910, becoming Professor of Educational Psychology at Stanford University. An expert on the measurement of intelligence, Terman subscribed to Francis Galton’s view that intelligence is genetically based, but was concerned that the typical chalk-and-talk schooling methods of the time were not well suited to highly intelligent children and therefore might prevent them from reaching their full genetic potential as the intellectual leaders of the future (Terman, 1915). By this stage, the First World War had begun and the US Army asked Terman to assist with the creation of an intelligence test that could be used to help to assign recruits to soldiering jobs that were appropriate to their abilities. In response, he led the successful adaptation of Alfred Binet’s famous IQ test into a mass-administration format, suitable for military job assignment.
After the First World War ended, Terman returned to his educational psychology research, where he began planning longitudinal research with intellectually gifted children. One question that particularly interested him was whether there was any truth in the stereotype that highly intelligent children have a tendency to develop into physically weak, sickly, socially inadequate and eccentric ‘egghead’ adults. He was also interested in what attributes predicted success. For these reasons, he initiated in 1921 a study in which schoolteachers in California were asked to nominate the most intelligent children in their class. Nominated children then had their intelligence confirmed empirically by being tested on the Stanford Binet intelligence test and were included in the study if their IQ score was 135 or greater. Children were added to the study on a rolling basis until 1928, yielding a final sample size of 1,528 (856 boys, 672 girls). Terman gathered an exhaustive range of data on the children and their family backgrounds upon enrolment, then followed them up every five to ten years to see how they turned out.
Lewis Terman died in 1956: in his lifetime, data on the participants were collected in 1921, 1923, 1928, 1936, 1940, 1945, 1950 and 1955. In 1960, further data were collected by Melita Oden. Robert Sears (who was himself a participant) collected additional data in 1972, 1977, 1982 and 1986. More recently, what is probably the final work on this project (since almost all the participants are now dead) has been done by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin and colleagues, with their results being collated in a lively and fascinating book entitled The Longevity Project (Friedman & Martin, 2011) that is well worth reading for anyone who wants to know about the Terman Study in more detail. The first six chapters of the book report the effects of personality on longevity-related life outcomes and the remaining ten chapters describe the effect on life outcomes of external factors such as parental divorce and exposure to warfare.
In conducting their personality research, Friedman, Martin and their colleagues faced a tricky technical challenge that might best be described as psychometric archaeology: Terman recorded a detailed range of personality attributes, but did not have at his disposal the psychometrically polished personality questionnaires that are used by modern personality researchers. These modern questionnaires, as mentioned previously, typically boil down the variations of human personality into five fundamental dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness (Digman, 1990; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1993). Nevertheless, Friedman and Martin reasoned that the impressions of personality gained from Terman’s data should be broadly comparable to those produced by modern self-report questionnaires.
The first personality measurement in the Terman Study was done in 1922 by asking parents and teachers to rate the personality attributes of the participants on a variety of traits using a 13-point scale. Later research directly asked the participants about their own personality attributes by means of various self-report questionnaires. Although these early attempts at measuring personality are not directly comparable to modern personality questionnaires, Friedman and Martin nevertheless found that Terman’s personality data were capable of being reanalysed to produce modern scores. This was determined by testing a new cohort of participants using the Terman personality measures, then asking the same people to complete a modern five-factor personality questionnaire (the NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992). The results of the two types of questionnaire measurement were then compared statistically, allowing items in Terman’s personality questionnaires that represented modern items to be used to create an approximately modern personality profile for the Terman participants. Of the five personality factors in modern representations of personality (extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness), only scores on openness to experience could not be recreated owing to a lack of suitable items in Terman’s original research (Martin & Friedman, 2000). Since the focus of this book is conscientiousness and agreeableness, this is not a problem.
To cut a long, but fascinating, story short, based on their analyses of the whole lives of the Terman Study participants, Friedman and Martin conclude that conscientiousness is by far the most important personality variable with regard to life outcomes. Agreeableness was also a significant factor, but in a narrower way: it was positively related to happiness and good health but this appeared to be a product of a pleasant inter-personal manner aiding the formation of harmonious relationships with other people, rather than any direct causal relationship between agreeableness and happiness or health. This finding is nevertheless important for the theory advanced in this book because most jobs require social interaction. The data on agreeableness effects from the Terman Study therefore back up the occupational data summarised in the previous chapter that showed agreeableness relates to organisational citizenship behaviour: being unable to form harmonious relationships with colleagues or customers because of a disagreeable manner is likely to render a person less employable, and so increase their chance of ending up unemployed and claiming welfare benefits.
Conscientiousness, on the other hand, was found by Friedman and Martin to affect almost every aspect of life, directly and indirectly. Most clearly
, highly conscientious children went on to live significantly healthier and longer lives than their less conscientious peers. This finding raises a rather important question, namely why should a phenomenon with so many contributing causal factors, namely death, be related to the tendency to behave in an orderly, responsible manner? Friedman and Martin found three main reasons. First, and rather obviously, is the discovery that highly conscientious participants engaged in more health-promoting behaviours and engaged in fewer death-promoting behaviours than their less conscientious peers. For example, they were more likely to obey rules on wearing seat belts in cars or follow instructions from the doctor concerning medicines and were less likely to smoke or abuse drugs. Friedman and Martin emphasise that this is not the same as being risk averse, but rather that ‘they tend to be sensible in evaluating how far to push the envelope’ (Friedman & Martin, 2011, p. 16). In the welfare trait theory advanced in this book, this attribute of being sensibly aware of risks is important: if the welfare system does indeed increase the proportion of individuals in the population who are not sensible in judging how far to push the envelope, then it is easy to see that it will damage human capital. This will happen due to the increased frequency of reckless, foolhardy behaviour that not only makes life less tolerable for the law-abiding, doctor-obeying, solid citizens who get caught in the crossfire, but also places a greater burden on the public purse expense, whether through increased insurance claims, or hospital bills, or prison costs.