The Person-situation Debate Revisited: Effect of Situation Strength and Trait Activation on the Validity of the Big Five Personality Traits in Predicting Job Performance

Derived from two theoretical concepts – situation strength and trait activation – we develop and test an interactionist model governing the degree to which five-factor model personality traits are related to job performance. One concept – situation strength – was hypothesized to predict the validities of all Big-Five traits, while the effects of the other – trait activation – were hypothesized to be specific to each trait. Based on this integrative model, personality–performance correlations were located in the literature, and occupationally homogeneous jobs were coded according to their theoretically-relevant contextual properties. Results revealed that all five traits were more predictive of performance for jobs in which the process by which the work was done represented weak situations (e.g., work was unstructured, employee had discretion to make decisions). Many of the traits also predicted performance in job contexts that activated specific traits (e.g., extraversion better predicted performance in jobs requiring social skills, agreeableness was less positively related to performance in competitive contexts, openness was more strongly related to performance in jobs with strong innovation/creativity requirements). Overall, the findings supported our interactionist model in which the situation exerts both general and specific effects on the degree to which personality predicts job performance. Academy of Management Journal