Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

26 MURRAY R. BARRICK AND MICHAEL K. MOUNT
MEDIATORS: HOW DO CONSCIENTIOUSNESS AND EMOTIONAL
STABILITY PREDICT PERFORMANCE?
Motivation
Clearly, there are numerous advantages to organizations when they select applicants based on
conscientiousness and emotional stability. Another way to view their impact is to consider the
likely negative consequences to organizations that do not select employees based on conscientiousness
and emotional stability – but all of their competitors do. Many of the applicants
that remain in the applicant pool have already been screened on these two traits and have
been found undesirable. That is, the remaining applicants are more likely to describe
themselves as lazy, irresponsible, undependable, careless, moody, lacking confi dence, stress ­
prone, anxious, and depressed. Clearly, this is no way to build a productive workforce.
But how do conscientiousness and emotional stability affect performance? Earlier we
made the distinction that personality traits influence what people will do whereas intelli gence
influences what they can do. Research clearly demonstrates that motivational or will - do factors
play a central role in predicting job performance (e.g. Mitchell and Daniels, 2003 ). Although
there are many ways to conceptualize motivation, the three most commonly studied
approaches are goal - setting theory, expectancy theory, and self - effi cacy theory. According
to goal - setting theory, the process of setting goals leads to greater performance because
it directs effort and attention, increases time on task, leads to greater persistence, and provides
feedback about one ’s performance. It also helps people devise strategies for attaining
the goals; and once the goals are achieved, people feel more satisfied due to a greater
sense of accomplishment. Thousands of laboratory and field studies conducted in a wide
variety of settings using many different tasks demonstrate that the effects of goal setting
on performance are positive, potent, and robust (Locke and Latham, 2005 ; see Chapter 9 ,
this volume). With respect to expectancy theory, higher performance will result when
people believe that their effort leads to better performance and when they believe higher
performance leads to rewards they value. Self - efficacy theory posits that individuals who see
themselves as competent, worthy, and confident interpret their environment in positive ways
that infl uence work performance. These positive perceptions infl uence a person’s beliefs that
he or she can successfully cope with work’s (and life ’s) exigencies.
Judge and Ilies ( 2002 ) conducted a meta - analysis to investigate the relationships among the
Big Five personality dimensions and these three central theories of motivation. They found
that the two strongest and most consistent correlates of performance motivation across the
three motivation approaches were emotional stability and conscientiousness (extraversion was
also a consistent predictor but the relationships were weaker). These results are important
because they show that conscientiousness and emotional stability predict performance by
increasing individuals ’ motivation levels. These findings are consistent with what we would
expect from findings pertaining to the validity of the two traits in predicting performance.
Conscientiousness and emotional stability are the best predictors of performance and because
motivation is a major determinant of performance, it would be expected that these two traits
are also the best predictors of motivation. Thus conscientiousness and emotional stability
affect performance directly and indirectly through their effects on motivation processes.
Results from other studies support these findings. For example, meta - analytic research
conducted by Mount and Barrick ( 1995 ) showed that conscientiousness correlates highly