Transactions between Big‐5 personality traits and job characteristics across 20 years

Job characteristics and personality change in young adulthood: A 12-year longitudinal study and replication

OBJECTIVE

Personality changes are related to successfully performing adult occupational roles which require teamwork, duty, and managing stress. However, it is unclear how personality development relates to specific job characteristics that vary across occupations.

METHOD

We investigated whether 151 objective job characteristics, derived from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), were associated with personality levels and changes in a 12-year longitudinal sample followed over the school to work transition. Using cross-validated regularized modeling, we combined two Icelandic longitudinal datasets (total N = 1054) and constructed an individual-level, aggregated job characteristics score that maximized prediction of personality levels at baseline and change over time.

RESULTS

The strongest association was found for level of openness (0.25), followed by conscientiousness (0.16) and extraversion (0.14). Overall, aggregated job characteristics had a stronger prediction for personality intercepts (0.14) than slopes (0.10). These results were subsequently replicated in a U.S. sample using levels of the Big Five as the dependent variable. This indicates that associations between job characteristics and personality are generalizable across life stages and nations.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings suggest that job titles are a valuable resource that can be linked to personality to better understand factors that influence psychological development. Further work is needed to document the prospective validity of job characteristics across a wider range of occupations and age.

Toward an Index of Adaptive Personality Regulation

The idea that matching personality expression with situational demands is adaptive is implicit in many accounts of personality. Numerous constructs and measures have been posited to address this or similar phenomena. Few have proven adequate. In response, we proposed and tested a novel measurement approach (the APR index) assessing real-time behavior to rate participants' success in matching personality expression with situational demands, which we denote adaptive personality regulation. An experimental study (N = 88) and an observational study of comedians (N = 203) provided tests of whether the APR index constituted a useful metric of adaptive personality regulation. In both studies, the APR index showed robust psychometric properties; was statistically unique from mean-level personality, self-monitoring, and the general factor of personality expression; and provided incremental concurrent prediction of task/job performance. The results suggest that the APR index provides a useful metric for studying the phenomenon of successfully matching personality expression to situational demands.

Conceptual and methodological issues in the study of the personality-and-culture relationship

Culture-and-personality studies were central to social science in the early 20th century and have recently been revived (as personality-and-culture studies) by trait and cross-cultural psychologists. In this article we comment on conceptual issues, including the nature of traits and the nature of the personality-and-culture relationship, and we describe methodological challenges in understanding associations between features of culture and aspects of personality. We give an overview of research hypothesizing the shaping of personality traits by culture, reviewing studies of indigenous traits, acculturation and sojourner effects, birth cohorts, social role changes, and ideological interventions. We also consider the possibility that aggregate traits affect culture, through psychological means and gene flow. In all these cases we highlight alternative explanations and the need for designs and analyses that strengthen the interpretation of observations. We offer a set of testable hypotheses based on the premises that personality is adequately described by Five-Factor Theory, and that observed differences in aggregate personality traits across cultures are veridical. It is clear that culture has dramatic effects on the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from which we infer traits, but it is not yet clear whether, how, and in what degree culture shapes traits themselves.