Big Five Personality Traits

Evidence for the Big Five Personality Dimensions

Research stimulated by Tupes and Christal provides compelling evidence for the robustness of the Big Five personality dimensions. This is the basis for the recent interest in personality assessment in applied psychology. The evidence indicates that the fivefactor structure of personality is consistent across different theoretical frameworks (Goldberg, 1981; Johnson and Ostendorf, 1993; McCrae and Costa, 1996), using different measures (Conley, 1985; Costa and McCrae, 1992; Lorr and Youniss, 1973), in different cultures (Bond, Nakazato, and Shiraishi, 1975; Borkenau and Ostendorf, 1989; Digman and Takemoto-Chock, 1981), using ratings from different sources (Digman and Inouye, 1986; McCrae and Costa, 1987; Norman, 1963; Watson, 1989), and across different methods of data accumulation (Borgatta, 1964). The Big Five is a structure for organizing the natural language of human attributes; it is not a theory of personality or an explanation of behavior. However, McCrae and Costa (1996) point out that these factors provide the nucleus for a theory of personality, and they describe certain distinctive elements of such a theory.

The word personality has two definitions, and the distinction between them is important. On the one hand, personality can be defined from the viewpoint of an actor and concerns a person's identity. On the other hand, personality can be defined from the viewpoint of an observer and concerns a person's reputation. Reputation reflects the distinctive features of another's behavior; trait words are used to describe how a person is perceived by others. Each person's reputation can be described using the Big Five personality dimensions in the following terms:

• 1.
  Quiet and unassertive versus active and outgoing (extraversion/surgency)
• 2.
  Hard-nosed and tough versus tactful and sensitive (agreeableness)
• 3.
  Impulsive and careless versus dependable and conforming (conscientiousness)
• 4.
  Nervous and moody versus calm and assured (emotional stability)
• 5.
  Narrow and unimaginative versus curious and imaginative (intellect/openness to experience)

One answer to the question of what to include, when measuring personality, is to assess the major components of reputation—the Big Five. Some personality inventories assess Big Five constructs, although scale labels are not consistent with the Big Five terminology. Only a few recently developed inventories explicitly measure the Big Five, and these usually have different scale labels for the same constructs (Costa and McCrae, 1992; Hogan and Hogan, 1995; Mount and Barrick, 2001). Before 1990 many researchers doubted the validity of personality measures for predicting occupational performance. However, when the Big Five structure is used to organize personality scales across studies, accumulated results indicate that personality measures significantly predict of a wide range of performance for virtually every job in the world of work (Hogan and Holland, 2003). The study of personality and leadership is a specific instance of this state of affairs.

...