The Big 5

1. The Big 5 Lucas Nelson Ross Brandon Richard Severs

2. Overview • What are the Big 5? • History • Dimensions • Criticisms • Psychometric Properties • Big 5 and Job Performance, Job Satisfaction and Leadership

3. What are the Big Five? • Five broad dimensions of personality traits. • Five basic source traits that make up the fundamental building blocks of personality. • Collectively, a taxonomy of personality traits • A coordinate system that maps which traits go together. • Five trait clusters that are strongly internally correlated and not strongly correlated with one another.

4. History of Big Five • Lexical Hypothesis assumes important human traits will be… • represented in all languages • have many nuanced synonyms • Allport and Odbert: • Went through an English-language dictionary and discovered more than 4,000 words that described specific personality traits. • Cattell: • Reduced 4,000 terms to about 171 characteristics • Used factor analysis to identify traits closely related to one another. • Eventually reduced his list to 16 key personality factors. • Eysenck: • Three dimensions • Introversion-extroversion • Neuroticism-emotional • Psychoticism

5. History of Big Five • Lew Goldberg coined the term “Big Five”. • Began with a study by Tupes and Christal (1958, 1961). • The Big Five structure was derived from statistical analyses of which traits tend to co-occur in people’s descriptions of themselves or other people. • A factor analysis was used to analyze how various personality traits are correlated in humans. • Costa and McCrae • Big Five Model • Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness.

6. Neuroticism • The tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression • High • Anxiety • Self-consciousness • Depression • Vulnerability • Impulsiveness • Angry hostility • Low • Calm • Even-tempered • Unemotional • Hardy

7. Neuroticism • Individuals high on Neuroticism have more bad feelings and psychological distress because… • Generate more stressful situations by getting into arguments, etc. • React more strongly negatively to stressful events. • Direct bad feelings associated with Neuroticism even without stressors. • Individuals have more psychosomatic symptoms, irritation, anger, and nervousness.

8. Extroversion • Characterized by positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek out stimulation and the company of others. • High • Gregariousness • Activity Level • Assertiveness • Excitement Seeking • Positive Emotions • Warmth • Low • Reserved • Loner • Quiet

9. Extroversion • More resistant to distraction, cognitive interference, and perform better on tasks requiring divided attention. • Its sociability is related to positive affect. • Impulsivity is related to negative affect

10. Openness to Experience • A general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. • High • Fantasy • Aesthetics • Feelings • Ideas • Actions • Values • Low • Down-to-earth • Conventional • Uncreative • Prefer routine

11. Openness to Experience • Alternately labeled culture, intelligence, openness. • High in very creative people. • Correlated with… • Active intelligence • Education • # of career changes • Aesthetic interests and sensitivity • Intellectual absorption • Broad values

12. Agreeableness • Tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. • High • Straightforwardness • Trust • Altruism • Modesty • Tendermindedness • Compliance • Low • Aggressive • Ruthless • Suspicious

13. Agreeableness • Includes altruism, affection, humaneness, sincerity • Most related to good parenting in mothers.

14. Conscientiousness • Tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement. • High • Self-discipline • Dutifulness • Competence • Order • Deliberation • Achievement striving • Low • Lazy • Aimless • Quitting

15. Conscientiousness • Most related to success across jobs and situations. • College level individuals high in Conscientiousness predicts job success years in the future • Related to good scores on integrity tests

16. Criticisms of the Big Five • The model is theory-driven rather than determined by empirical inevitability. • The Big Five have repeatedly been found to be non-orthogonal and correlate with each other. • Cannot encompass all of human personality • Too Broad • Not enough clarity over what the factors actually mean • Does not make any advances in getting towards an understanding of what makes up personality.

17. Criticisms of the Big Five • Block (1995) suggests that the lexical hypothesis is a "psychologically insufficient" hypothesis, drawing on the observation of McCrae and Costa (1985) that psychologists have uncovered important aspects of personality that were not encoded in the language • There are many aspects of personality that cannot be captured with a single-word term

18. Big 5 Traits • Because the Big 5 is so broad, there is some variation from study to study about the dimensions themselves and what they include • Question became “Which Big 5 should be used?” as different researchers simply preferred different labels in their research • As a result, a set of judges combined over 300 adjectives or traits to form the Adjective Check List

19. Big 5 Traits

20. Big 5 Traits • In another study, certain clusters of personality traits were determined to be independent from a Big 5 dimension • Religious, devout, reverent = .07 • Sexy, sensual, erotic = .13 • Egotistical, conceited, snobbish = .16 • Humorous, witty, amusing = .13

21. Psychometric Properties • Because there are many scales that measure the Big 5, John and Srivastava (1991) looked at the validity and reliability of three commonly used instruments: • NEO-FFI • TDA • BFI

22. Reliability

23. Validity

24. Big 5 and Job Performance • Previous research concluded that personality tests had low validity for predicting job performance • In a meta-analysis by Barrick & Mount (1991), they compared the Big 5 dimensions to three job performance criteria and five occupational groups • The results indicated that only one dimension, conscientiousness, showed significant relationships between performance and the groups.

25. Big 5 and Job Performance • Validity for Conscientiousness was .2 which suggests the trait is important to the accomplishment of work tasks in all jobs • Extraversion was found to be a valid predictor for two occupations: managers and sales • Openness to experience dimension a valid predictor of training proficiency

26. Big 5 and Job Satisfaction • In a meta-analysis by Judge, Heller, and Mount (2002), they found moderate correlations of job satisfaction with Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness

27. Big 5 and Job Satisfaction

28. Big 5 and Leadership • Can having certain personality traits predict that an individual will be a leader? • Transformational leadership (TL) inspires followers with a vision beyond their own self-interest • Uses four dimensions: • Idealized influence • Inspirational motivation • Intellectual stimulation • Individual consideration

29. Big 5 and Leadership • Results show that correlation between Big and TL is .40 and the strongest dimension was agreeableness at .32 • Support the construct of TL and generalizes across levels of organizations • Correlations between TL and leader effectiveness are not perfect though

30. Big 5 and Leadership • Study by Judge et al. (2002) studied the Big 5 traits and their relationship to leadership emergence and leadership success • They found extraversion and conscientiousness to be related to leadership emergence • Also, they found the Big 5 dimensions to be useful in predicting dispositional qualities of leadership, but there is little understanding as to why these traits predict leadership

31. Big 5 and Networking Intensity • In a study by Wanberg, Kanfer, and Banas (2000), predicted individual differences in networking intensity • Participants completed items that assessed the term networking intensity • All dimensions correlated in some way with networking intensity and job-search intensity • Only Extraversion and Conscientiousness predicted networking intensity while the others were non-significant