BIG FIVE continues

1. BIG FIVE continues

2. Openness to Experience • Alternately labeled culture, intellectance, openness. Which best fits depends in part on whether factors are derived lexically (intelligence) or via questionnaire (openness) • Correlated with intelligence, but it is an active intelligence, liking to think

3. Openness … continued • Correlated also with education (causal direction unclear), number of career changes, aesthetic interests and sensitivity, absorption (being fully engaged in what [intellectual tasks only?] one is doing), broad values, but the aesthetic and feeling components may lead to greater susceptibility to depression.

4. Conscientiousness • Self-disciplined, dutiful, organized, responsible, reliable, hard working. Of the big 5, most related to success across jobs and situations. • Others (E, A) predict success only in particular situations. • C’s prediction is stronger when occupational autonomy is high than when it is low.

5. Agreeableness • It includes altruism, affection, humaneness, sincerity. • Most related to pro-social tendencies. • Most related to good parenting in mothers (High A, low N make best mothers.

6. Normative change • Previous studies have shown that students become less authoritarian, ethnocentric, dogmatic, aggressive, during college, more complex in their outlooks, more original, unconventional, intelligent, psychological minded, cognitive commitment, absorption, open to experience, traits related to conscientiousness (orderliness, diligence, dependable, sense of control), no consistent changes extroversion-related traits (sociability, etc). Similarly for neuroticism, which either does not change or decreases. Previous work suggests that Openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness will increase, neuroticism will decrease, extroversion will not change. Cal Berkeley study using a Reliable Change Index supports the predicted change patterns for college students.

7. Block’s attack on the Five Factor • Key points: • -- To be “global, fully adequate,” it must be better than competing set of constructs. • --It is a model, rather than a theory. No functioning psychological system within the individual is postulated..

8. Limitations of Factor Analysis • Factors derived because they have lots of commonality with other measures says nothing directly about their ‘real world’ relevance. • -- Variables that don’t correlate with the mass of variables are often dismissed as “residual,” even though they are reliable and may be very important in ‘real world’ contexts. ‘Powerful’ factors can have trivial consequences when looking at particular concerns. • --The ‘mix’ of variables input into the factor analysis will determine which variables are large, explaining lots of common variance, and which ones are small.

9. Block cont. • --Such ‘prestructuring’ is common. Leads to replicable factors, but still says little about importance of the factors. • --There are still no agreed-on criteria for determining the number of factors to be extracted, or for rotating factors to obtain the best ‘psychological meaning’ of the factors. (e.g., is orthogonal rotation ‘psychologically inappropriate’ and forced. How does one know that a factor is not a ‘bloated’ complex of relatively independent constructs?) • --In any data set, there are an infinite set of factor loadings that equally explain the data. Unguided factor analysis cannot choose the most appropriate, the one most psychologically meaningful.

10. Block cont. • --Because FA starts with correlation matrices, all problems affecting correlations (reliability of variables, linearity of relations among them, method variance inflations, merging samples [males and females] where correlations may be quite different and meaningfully so among the subsamples [impulsivity and introspectiveness correlate positively for male grad students, negatively for AF pilots], unidirectional relationships [e.g. ‘wittiness’ requires intelligence, but intelligence does not mandate wittiness.] • Correlations [e.g., with ‘agreeableness’] don’t well reflect the contextuality that may be necessary for the relationship to occur.

11. Block concluded • --People are too prone to dismiss factors that don’t replicate, although they may be valid for particular samples. • --Comparing multiple models of the same data must be done by arbitrarily identified criteria via subjective criteria. (Cudeck & Henley, 1991) • --Anthropologically speaking, we appear to have a bias for a relatively small number of factors, yielding a picture of a world which is at the level of complexity we intuitively prefer. • --Therefore, the faith that the five-factor proponents have in this method as the sufficient for deciding personality structure is unwarranted.

12. Then, Costa & McCrae… • 1. Sought to determine the degree to which the five factor model is “recoverable” from other measures such as Block’s California Q-Set (CQS) or Jackson’s PRF. But they have not gone the other direction. They claim greater congruence than warranted. The CQS yielded 32 eigenvalues greater than 1; Block has identified 20 reliable factors. Even if just 8 factors, introspectiveness, narcissism, forcefulness emerge as three factors in the CQS not in the big 5. • Similar results with PRF. • 2. Extend Big 5 to thinking about psychiatric disorders. But that is an impoverished sampling of symptoms to represent disorders, which have identified many components. • 3. The revised NEO-PI-R added six dimensions for A and C. But when normed on 1000 subjects, N & C correlated -.53 and E and O .40, uncorrected for attenuation. Block replicated the large N - C correlation.

13. Costa and McCrae appear to admit that the model is theory-driven rather than determined by empirical inevitability. They also admit that if you keep all six facets on each dimension, you lose orthogonality. • The big five has never been empirically tested against alternative dimensional offerings to see which “best carves nature at its joints.” • So, given where we are, how good is the Big 5 for the scientific tasks ahead? Will it help or hinder the science of personality?

14. RECENT I/O APPLICATIONS OF “BIG FIVE” • Bernardin, H. J., Cooke, D. K., & Villanova, P. (2000). Conscientiousness and agreeableness as predictors of rating leniency. Journal of Applied Psychology • Results: A correlated .33 (p < .01) with average rating level; C correlated -.33 with average rating level. No significant interaction. N, E, and O were essentially unrelated to rating leniency. The result remained essentially the same when professor’s ratings were used as a control.

15. Hurtz, G. M. & Donovan, J. J. (2000). Personality and job performance: The big five revisited. Journal of Applied Psychology • Method: • Used only measures designed originally to measure the Big 5. • Found 26 studies, yielding between 35 and 45 measures for each of the five dimensions. • Moderators: • Worker occupation: Sales, customer service, manager, skilled and semiskilled. • Training proficiency (training performance and end-of-training tests) vs. job proficiency. • Performance clustered into 3 dvs: task performance (technical performance, use of equipment, etc.), job dedication (effort, persistence, reliability), interpersonal facilitation (cooperation, team player, etc.) • Computed composite score correlations (rather than average correlations) for lower-level measures to estimate higher factor correlations. If inter-test correlations not provided, used those from the HPI manual. • Similarly for overall job performance, if correlations not provided, entered .55 to compute composite score. • Corrections for “artifact distributions,” sampling error, measurement artifacts for both predictor and criterion variables

16. Results: • Overall, C & Stability (neuroticism) had significant true-score correlations, .22,.14. Agreeableness, at .13, was not at 90% confidence above zero. • By category, C was more predictive for Sales and customer service; for managers and skilled workers, it wasn’t significantly above .00 at 90% confidence interval. E and ES were significantly predictive for Sales, Customer service, managers, but not for skilled or semiskilled workers. Openness was significant only for customer service. • C and ES were also significant for Job performance but not for training performance. • ES was predictive for all three components, above 90% confidence, but correlations were small. (table 4). C was largest across the board, but only above 90% confidence interpersonal facilitation. A was related only to the interpersonal facilitation dimension above 90% confidence. • Discussion: • Conscientiousness may add “a small proportion of variance” in predicting job performance overall, others for predicting specific dimensions. But that would depend on the degree to which they have been picked up and overlap with other selection techniques (interviews, etc.) • Some results based on small correlations.

17. Judge, T. A. & Bono, J. E. (2000). Five-factor model of personality and transformational leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology • “Transformational leadership (TL)” (Bass, 1985)-- inspires followers with a vision beyond their own self interest, rather than relying on exchanges (i.e., transactional leadership). Four dimensions: • idealized influence -- charisma • inspirational motivation -- articulating the vision • intellectual stimulation -- stimulating follower creativity by challenging their view of status quo

18. Hypotheses • -- Neuroticism negatively related (self confident, self esteem missing, but needed for TL) • -- Extroversion positively related (related to sociability, charisma, social dominance, needed for TL) • -- Openness positively related (creativity, originality, divergent thinking, need for change, willingness to transform) • -- Agreeableness positively related (empathy, altruism, generosity, concern for others needed for TL). • -- Conscientiousness -- no hypothesis offered. • -- Transformational leadership will predict subordinate satisfaction, job satisfaction, work motivation, and ratings of leader effectiveness. • -- TL will predict leader outcomes controlling for transactional leader behavior.

19. Method: • Participants were 316 members and 223 (48% of whom participated by returning materials) graduates of “community leadership programs.” • In first session, completed personality survey (NEO-PR-I). Gave surveys to supervisors and subordinates (80+% in each case). • Transformational Leadership was measured by MLQ, Form 5X (Bass’s measure). Covers the four dimensions: • Idealized influence-attributed, “Displays a sense of power and confidence” • Idealized influence-behavior, “Talks to us about his/her most important values and beliefs” • Inspirational motivation, “Articulates a compelling vision for the future, • Intellectual stimulation, “Reexamines critical assumptions to question whether they are appropriate” • Individualized consideration, “Spends time teaching and coaching me.” • Transactional leader behaviors also measured by MLQ 5X • (See items, p. 756). • Also measures of subordinate satisfaction with leader, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work motivation, each from at least two subordinates. • Leader effectiveness measured by five items from immediate supervisor.

20. Transformational leader behaviors all loaded on one factor. • E, O, A all correlated with TL, but O had non-significant beta when others were entered, so O may not “contribute.” • A broader definition of Neuroticism, drawn from Judge Et al.’s core self-evaluation theory, functioned no better than neuroticism as measured by the big 5. • TL predicted all the anticipated outcomes except job satisfaction (Table 6). • Eight control variables (gender, age, job and organizational tenure, public vs. private industry, organization size, number reporting to the leader) did not affect the TL -> leader effectiveness relationship (controlling increased slightly from .35 to .37). • Discussion: • The reliable multiple-R between the Big 5 and transformational leadership is .40. The strongest single correlation was .32 (with agreeableness). But these are stronger than found for job performance (.22, .30) • The strongest correlation with agreeableness was surprising, but it is related to group performance. • Surprised that Openness was not predictive once agreeableness and extroversion were entered, that Neuroticism didn’t predict (even when defined more broadly). • But the results support the construct of transformational leadership and its effects strongly, generalizing across different types and levels of organizations.