Sarah Mannon
PSYCH 484 Research Paper
10/7/14
When l learned about this research paper, I was interested to find out what, if
any, of the Big Five personality traits were related to counterproductive workplace
behaviors (CWBs). This question interests me because CWBs can affect organizations
in very negative ways both at the organizational level and at the personal level. When I
came across this article I was even more intrigued because not only does it find the
associations between the Big Five and CWBs; it looks at when the participants were
adolescents and their personality then, and compares that to their CWBs 18 years later.
This is particularly interesting to know to help identify what factors could contribute to
the likelihood of engaging in CWBs. I believed in their hypothesis that stated those low
in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, and those high is Neuroticism would be
related to CWBs. I believed this because it makes sense that someone who is tense,
not very friendly, and is unreliable to engage in CWBs.
The research design of this study was a survey given at different points in time.
The study began as 451 adolescents from Iowa and by the end of the research there
were reports from 296 of them. This study started in 1989 when the targets were in
seventh grade and concluded in 2010. In the first part of the study, they operationalized
the Big Five personality traits by asking adolescents to complete a self-report survey
using a five-point scale asking them questions where they answered anywhere from
strongly agree to strongly disagree. Then after about 18 years they asked the then
adolescents who participated in the Big Five assessment to report their involvement in
CWBs now that they were adults. To measure CWBs they also used a self-report and
measured it on a seven-point scale from never doing it, to engaging daily. To go further
they were able to break down CWBs and differentiate between Interpersonal and
Organizational. Interpersonal CWBs were considered actions directed against coworkers such as harassment or aggressive acts. Organizational CWBs were acts
against the organization as a whole such as stealing property, substance abuse, or
being absent.
The research found that the only Big Five personality traits that correlated with
CWBs were agreeableness and conscientiousness. The correlational table shows the
adolescents who said they were agreeable had a r= -.18 with overall CWBs. This means
that those who said they were friendly, modest, and empathetic were negatively related
to engaging in CWBs such as absenteeism, theft, or harassment generally speaking.
Also it is important to note there was a higher negative correlation with Interpersonal
CWBs (r= -.20) than Organizational CWBs (r= -.12) as compared to agreeableness.
This shows that people who said they were agreeable were less likely to engage in
CWBs such as making fun or acting rudely to a coworker than doing actions against the
organization. The other statistically significant evidence the research finds is
conscientiousness is negatively correlated with CWBs at an r= -.18. For
conscientiousness they also found that the Interpersonal CWBs and Organizational
CWBs were the same at r= -.16 which means those people reported on average not
engaging in both types of CWBs at the same rate.
Another interesting part of this study was they performed a meditation analyses.
They wanted to find if there was something that explained why personality and CWBs
were correlated. They wanted to see if either academic achievement or job satisfaction
were mediating factors. The table shows academic achievement was not statistically
significant. This means no matter the adolescents GPA or ITED scores, academic
achievement does not explain why agreeableness and conscientiousness are related to
CWBs. When it came to job satisfaction they did find some evidence of a mediating
effect on conscientiousness but not on agreeableness. This being said, job satisfaction
only partially accounted for the relationship, so even though what they found was
statistically significant it did not change the relationship of personality traits and CWBs
by much. To summarize, they found that your personality partially explains your
satisfaction with your job, which partially explains your likelihood of engaging in CWBs
although it does not substantially affect it.
Overall I feel that these results provide very important information. The presence
of CWBs are extremely costly to an organization and can be very hard to figure out how
much of them are actually occurring. Although the results of this data do not show
causality it does show a negative relationship between the personality traits of
agreeableness and conscientiousness with CWBs. This research could be applied to
the work setting when selecting applicants. If you were in an organization that really
can’t afford the presence of CWBs, you would want to hire people that were not likely to
engage in them. When selecting your employees you could give them a survey to
assess their personality and really focus on their agreeableness and conscientiousness
scores. If they scored high in both of them, the research shows that they are probably
less likely to engage in CWBs then people who score low in both of those dimensions.
When I came across this article I immediately noticed one of the strengths of this
article. Since these participants were tested at two different points in time, common
method variance is not a source of bias. Many research studies in this field are surveys
given at one point in time, using one method from the same source, where this study is
not. This allows the researchers to show temporal precedence, which is one of the
factors of proving causality. This means that x comes before y in time. They were able
to measure the adolescent’s personality (variable x) and then at a later time measure
those now adults CWBs (variable y).
In saying that there are multiple limitations to this research. Collecting the data at
two different points in time does show temporal precedence, but it is not enough to
prove causality. Correlational research is able to demonstrate covariance, which is as x
changes, y changes and this type of research meets the requirements of temporal
precedence but there is still the problem of internal validity. This research does not look
at all the alternative explanations that the changes of Y are really caused by the
changes in X and nothing else affects it. As discussed before they do meditational
analyses and find that job satisfaction has some impact but it doesn’t explain it enough.
There are probably other factors that either moderate or mediate the relationship
between personality and CWBs but they did not look into them. These other variables
known as confounds could drastically impact the results of this research and the fact
that they are not discussed fully is a big limitation.
Another major limitation in general is the use of a correlational or survey method.
This causes a problem because of the perceptual and response biases. When the
adolescents were first taking the personality assessment they might have seen
themselves as something different then they actually were and it could have affected
the data. They also might not have wanted to admit some of the negative aspects of
their personality because they didn’t want to be judged or seem different. These biases
also pose a threat to the survey asking them about their activity in CWBs. Since CWBs
are an act of delinquency, people may be hesitant to admit engaging in such an activity
and since there is no way of knowing if they are lying or not the results may be
inaccurate. Another limitation that should be noted is sampling bias. All of these
adolescents were participating in the Iowa Youth and Families Project. All of these 451
families were from rural Iowa so it could be argued if that is generalizable to the
population. Rural Iowa is definitely not the same environment as a lot of other people
across the country are used to, so this research may have a sampling bias.
In conclusion I found these findings very interesting. I think that it is important
that the only two personality traits of the Big Five that were significant were
agreeableness and conscientiousness. It does make sense that people who are more
organized and friendly report engaging in CWBs less frequently because those are very
pro-social behaviors and engaging in CWBs are delinquent behaviors. What is
interesting is that Extroversion, Neuroticism and Openness are not significant
predictors. I thought that people who would be highly neurotic, such as people who are
tense and susceptible to negative emotions would have a positive correlation with
engaging in CWBs. In the end my predictions were mostly accurate except for my belief
about neuroticism. I feel as if this research provides good evidence in the relationship
between conscientiousness and agreeableness with CWBs and should be researched
more in depth to try to prove causality. Additional research should also use a different
research method such as observation to avoid the biases with correlational data.
Citation
Le, K., Brent Donnellan, M., Spilman, S. K., Garcia, O. P., & Conger, R. (2014).
Workers behaving badly: Associations between adolescent reports of the Big Five and
counterproductive work behaviors in adulthood. Personality and Individual Differences,
61, 7-12.
Hyperlink: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886913014037