The Big 5
Lucas Nelson Ross
Brandon Richard Severs
Overview
What are the Big 5?
 History
 Dimensions
 Criticisms
 Psychometric Properties
 Big 5 and Job Performance, Job
Satisfaction and Leadership
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What are the Big Five?
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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.
History of Big Five
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Lexical Hypothesis assumes important human traits will be…
◦ represented in all languages
◦ have many nuanced synonyms
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Allport and Odbert:
◦ Went through an English-language dictionary and discovered more than
4,000 words that described specific personality traits.
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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.
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Eysenck:
◦ Three dimensions
 Introversion-extroversion
 Neuroticism-emotional
 Psychoticism
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.
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◦ A factor analysis was used to analyze how various personality
traits are correlated in humans.
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Costa and McCrae
◦ Big Five Model
◦ Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness to Experience,
Agreeableness, Conscientiousness.
Neuroticism
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The tendency to experience negative emotions, such as
anger, anxiety, or depression
High
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Anxiety
Self-consciousness
Depression
Vulnerability
Impulsiveness
Angry hostility
Low
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Calm
Even-tempered
Unemotional
Hardy
Neuroticism
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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.
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Individuals have more psychosomatic
symptoms, irritation, anger, and nervousness.
Extroversion
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Characterized by positive emotions, surgency, and the
tendency to seek out stimulation and the company of
others.
High
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Gregariousness
Activity Level
Assertiveness
Excitement Seeking
Positive Emotions
Warmth
Low
◦ Reserved
◦ Loner
◦ Quiet
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
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Openness to Experience
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A general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas,
imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.
High
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Fantasy
Aesthetics
Feelings
Ideas
Actions
Values
Low
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Down-to-earth
Conventional
Uncreative
Prefer routine
Openness to Experience
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Alternately labeled culture, intelligence,
openness.
High in very creative people.
Correlated with…
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Active intelligence
Education
# of career changes
Aesthetic interests and sensitivity
Intellectual absorption
Broad values
Agreeableness
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Tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather
than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
High
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Straightforwardness
Trust
Altruism
Modesty
Tendermindedness
Compliance
Low
◦ Aggressive
◦ Ruthless
◦ Suspicious
Agreeableness
Includes altruism, affection, humaneness,
sincerity
 Most related to good parenting in
mothers.
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Conscientiousness
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Tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim
for achievement.
High
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Self-discipline
Dutifulness
Competence
Order
Deliberation
Achievement striving
Low
◦ Lazy
◦ Aimless
◦ Quitting
Conscientiousness
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Most related to success across jobs and
situations.
◦ College level individuals high in
Conscientiousness predicts job success years
in the future
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Related to good scores on integrity tests
Criticisms of the Big Five
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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.
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
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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
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Big 5 Traits
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
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Psychometric Properties
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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
Reliability
Validity
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.
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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
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Big 5 and Job Satisfaction
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In a meta-analysis by Judge, Heller, and
Mount (2002), they found moderate
correlations of job satisfaction with
Neuroticism, Extraversion, and
Conscientiousness
Big 5 and Job Satisfaction
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 selfinterest
 Uses four dimensions:
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Idealized influence
Inspirational motivation
Intellectual stimulation
Individual consideration
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
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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
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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
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