Queen Essays

LEADERSHIP

The Balance Needed to Lead Change by Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay

September 16, 2008

by Kerry A. Bunker and Michael Wakefield

One reason leading change is so difficult is the tension it sets up between managing

business issues (creating a vision, aligning resources, restructuring the

organization) and managing people issues (the legitimate concerns and feelings of

those who must carry out the change and deal with its ramifications day-to-day).

Most managers are adept at the business side of leading change. They are trained to

deal with structural and operational issues, and they are evaluated on and

rewarded for their ability to innovate and to deliver business results.

But the pressures generated by major structural or operational change compel

leaders to pay particular attention to what’s happening on the human side of the

organization. And it is here that many leaders fall short. The result? A destabilized

organizational culture, an erosion of trust, insufficient buy-in, and fear and

skepticism among employees at a time when a loyal, productive, and enthusiastic

workforce is essential for success.

So how do leaders address the people side of change without jeopardizing the

business side? How can they make tough decisions without losing sight of the

emotions and concerns of employees at all levels of the organization? At the Center

for Creative Leadership (CCL), we’ve found that the answer lies in building trust

through authenticity.

When leaders focus on establishing trust, they are better able to deal with both the

business and the human elements of change. They find they can be both tough

decision makers and empathetic people managers–committed to the plan, yet

understanding of the discomfort it might cause. They become agile and resilient,

able to rise to the challenges of innovation and change.

Striking the right balance To create and sustain an environment of trust during change, leaders must strike a

balance between these six pairs of opposites:

Balance #1: Catalyze change/Cope with transition. Catalyzing change involves the ability to manage an initiative, generate buy-in, and

maintain momentum. Coping with transition means recognizing and addressing

people’s feelings and opinions about the change and its possible fallout. Leaders

who are adept at both create a climate in which people can work together, even in

difficult times. They embrace the vision of change and can communicate that vision

with enthusiasm and energy.

At the same time, they give themselves and others permission to express doubt or

anxiety. Trust and commitment reach a higher level, and the change initiative gains

momentum as people work through the process.

Balance #2: Show a sense of urgency/Demonstrate realistic patience. One of the most critical tasks for leaders of change is communicating a sense of

urgency. A sense of urgency keeps positive energy flowing and increases

productivity.

Patience, however, is just as important. Realistic patience involves knowing when

and how to slow the pace so that people can adapt. A lack of patience with people

can undermine their commitment and impede the change process. Balanced

leaders don’t panic, overreact, or make everything equally important. They make a

conscious effort to provide support and guidance when it’s needed. They recognize

that people adapt to change in different ways. Some may require additional

training or time to meet new expectations; others may need a forum to air their

gripes. Realistic patience also means giving consistent, honest feedback. People

need to know what they’re doing well and what they can do differently.

Balance #3: Be tough/Be empathetic. Being tough involves facing challenges head on, being decisive, and taking a firm

stand in the face of resistance. Being empathetic means understanding and being

sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others.

Empathetic leaders are able to put themselves in other people’s shoes, consider

individual limitations, and value people as much as results. They know that a lack

of empathy can corrode morale and motivation.

These two competencies are among the most difficult for leaders to balance. Many

leaders have been taught to shut down their emotional responses in order to make

difficult decisions. They worry that letting their “soft side” show will communicate

weakness or lack of commitment. But connecting emotionally actually creates the

opposite effect in times of significant change or crisis. People want to know that

their leaders can be tough and decisive, but they want them to be human, too.

Balance #4: Show optimism/Be realistic and open. Leaders play a crucial role in maintaining optimism about major change. They need

to see its positive effects and convey that vision to others. When people are

stressed by change, they look to their leaders for energy and confidence. Optimistic

leaders are genuinely committed to the change at hand, and their optimism is

contagious.

But balanced leaders are not blindly optimistic. Their optimism is balanced with

realism and openness. They can clearly read a situation for what it is. They don’t

sugarcoat the facts, and they can admit their mistakes. Balanced leaders ask the

hard questions, deliver the news (both good and bad), and draw attention to

challenges and struggles. A balance of optimism and realism generates trust.

Balance #5: Be self-reliant/Trust others. Leaders who are self-reliant have confidence in their own skills and abilities. They

are accustomed to working independently and often pride themselves on “going it

alone.” Trusting others means allowing them to do their part of a task or project

without interference or overmanagement. In situations of complex change, it is

critical for leaders to trust others to bring their own perspectives and expertise to

the table.

Many leaders find this pair of competencies very hard to balance. The myth of the

heroic leader who remains strong, courageous, and self-reliant in the face of

extraordinary challenges is a deeply ingrained one. In reality, leaders are more

likely to rise to new heights when they confront complexity with a strong team of

allies. Whatever the challenge, a collaborative approach yields insight, innovation,

and action that even the most talented individual cannot generate alone.

Balance #6: Capitalize on strengths/Go against the grain. In times of crisis, leaders have a tendency to draw on the traits and abilities that led

to their success in the past. But overreliance on past behaviors can cement leaders

into strategies that no longer work, and the failure to recognize conditions that

demand a new approach can be disastrous. On an individual level, failure to adapt

is the main reason leaders derail. Leaders must have the ability to leave their

comfort zone and challenge preferred patterns–in essence, to go against the grain.

To balance their innate strengths with new skills, leaders must first assess their

strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and default behaviors. In CCL programs, they

do this through a combination of 360-degree assessments, feedback, and coaching.

Direct and honest feedback from bosses, colleagues, and direct reports can also

provide leaders with a clear picture of their own performance and behavior.

Such awareness allows leaders to identify their strengths, shore up their

weaknesses, and practice different behaviors. Self-awareness also allows leaders to

leverage the diverse talents, experiences, and opinions of others, eliminating tunnel

vision and groupthink.

The paradox of leadership Leading change requires managing the constant tension between business-driven

and people-focused priorities. Circumstances will sometimes demand that leaders

play harder on the business side. But when they have built a strong foundation of

trust, those who follow are more likely to do so in a spirit of cooperation and

teamwork.

It’s not possible to be perfectly in balance all the time. But wise leaders recognize

that it’s an ideal worth striving for.

* * * *

THE SIX TENSIONS OF LEADING CHANGE

I. Catalyze change Champion an initiative or a significant change, consistently promote it, and

encourage others to get on board.

vs.

Cope with transition Recognize and address the personal and emotional aspects of change.

II. Show a sense of urgency Demonstrate the need to take action; accelerate the pace of change.

vs.

Demonstrate realistic patience Know when and how to slow the pace so that people can cope and adapt.

III. Be tough Make difficult decisions without hesitation or second-guessing.

vs.

Be empathetic Take others’ perspectives into account; understand the impact of your actions and

decisions.

IV. Show optimism See the positive side of any challenge; convey that optimism to others.

vs.

Be realistic and open Speak candidly about the situa¬tion, and don’t shy away from dif¬ficulties; admit

personal mistakes.

V. Be self-reliant Be confident in your ability to handle new challenges.

vs.

Trust others Be open to others’ input and sup¬port; allow them to do their part.

VI. Capitalize on strengths Know your personal and organizational strengths; confidently apply them to new

situations and circumstances.

vs.

Go against the grain Show willingness to learn and try new things–even when the process is difficult or

painful.

Kerry A. Bunker is a senior enterprise associate and manager of the Awareness

Program for Executive Excellence (APEX) at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL),

in Greensboro, N.C. Michael Wakefield is a senior enterprise associate at CCL, where

he designs and trains in a variety of programs. This article is adapted from their book

Leading with Authenticity in Times of Transition, published in 2005 by CCL Press.

Related Topics: Change Management | Managing Uncertainty

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LEADERSHIP

Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills by Paul J. H. Schoemaker , Steve Krupp and Samantha Howland

From the January–February 2013 Issue

T he storied British banker and financier Nathan Rothschild noted that

great fortunes are made when cannonballs fall in the harbor, not when

violins play in the ballroom. Rothschild understood that the more

unpredictable the environment, the greater the opportunity—if you have

the leadership skills to capitalize on it. Through research at the Wharton School

and at our consulting firm involving more than 20,000 executives to date, we have

identified six skills that, when mastered and used in concert, allow leaders to think

strategically and navigate the unknown effectively: the abilities to anticipate,

challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. Each has received attention in the

leadership literature, but usually in isolation and seldom in the special context of

high stakes and deep uncertainty that can make or break both companies and

careers. This article describes the six skills in detail. An adaptive strategic leader—

someone who is both resolute and flexible, persistent in the face of setbacks but

also able to react strategically to environmental shifts—has learned to apply all six

at once.

Do you have the right networks to help you see opportunities before competitors

do? Are you comfortable challenging your own and others’ assumptions? Can you

get a diverse group to buy in to a common vision? Do you learn from mistakes? By

answering questions like these, you’ll get a clear view of your abilities in each area.

The self-test at this article’s end (and the more detailed test available at

hbrsurvey.decisionstrat.com) will help you gauge your strengths and weaknesses,

address deficits, and optimize your full portfolio of leadership skills.

Let’s look at each skill in turn.

Anticipate Most organizations and leaders are poor at detecting ambiguous threats and

opportunities on the periphery of their business. Coors executives, famously, were

late seeing the trend toward low-carb beers. Lego management missed the

electronic revolution in toys and gaming. Strategic leaders, in contrast, are

constantly vigilant, honing their ability to anticipate by scanning the environment

for signals of change.

We worked with a CEO named Mike who had built his reputation as a turnaround

wizard in heavy manufacturing businesses. He was terrific at reacting to crises and

fixing them. After he’d worked his magic in one particular crisis, Mike’s company

enjoyed a bump in growth, fueled in part by an up cycle. But after the cycle had

peaked, demand abruptly softened, catching Mike off guard. More of the same in a

down market wasn’t going to work. Mike needed to consider various scenarios and

gather better information from diverse sources in order to anticipate where his

industry was headed.

We showed Mike and his team members how to pick up weak signals from both

inside and outside the organization. They worked to develop broader networks and

to take the perspective of customers, competitors, and partners. More alert to

opportunities outside the core business, Mike and the team diversified their

product portfolio and acquired a company in an adjacent market where demand

was higher and less susceptible to boom-and-bust cycles.

To improve your ability to anticipate:

Talk to your customers, suppliers, and other partners to understand their

challenges.

Conduct market research and business simulations to understand competitors’

perspectives, gauge their likely reactions to new initiatives or products, and predict

potential disruptive offerings.

Use scenario planning to imagine various futures and prepare for the unexpected.

Look at a fast-growing rival and examine actions it has taken that puzzle you.

List customers you have lost recently and try to figure out why.

Attend conferences and events in other industries or functions.

Challenge Strategic thinkers question the status quo. They challenge their own and others’

assumptions and encourage divergent points of view. Only after careful reflection

and examination of a problem through many lenses do they take decisive action.

This requires patience, courage, and an open mind.

Consider Bob, a division president in an energy company we worked with, who

was set in his ways and avoided risky or messy situations. When faced with a tough

problem—for example, how to consolidate business units to streamline costs—he

would gather all available information and retreat alone into his office. His

solutions, although well thought out, were predictable and rarely innovative. In the

consolidation case he focused entirely on two similar and underperforming

businesses rather than considering a bolder reorganization that would streamline

activities across the entire division. When he needed outside advice, he turned to a

few seasoned consultants in one trusted firm who suggested tried-and-true

solutions instead of questioning basic industry assumptions.

Through coaching, we helped Bob learn how to invite different (even opposing)

views to challenge his own thinking and that of his advisers. This was

uncomfortable for him at first, but then he began to see that he could generate

fresh solutions to stale problems and improve his strategic decision making. For

the organizational streamlining he even assigned a colleague to play devil’s

advocate—an approach that yielded a hybrid solution: Certain emerging market

teams were allowed to keep their local HR and finance support for a transitional

period while tapping the fully centralized model for IT and legal support.

To improve your ability to challenge:

Focus on the root causes of a problem rather than the symptoms. Apply the “five

whys” of Sakichi Toyoda, Toyota’s founder. (“Product returns increased 5% this

month.” “Why?” “Because the product intermittently malfunctions.” “Why?” And

so on.)

List long-standing assumptions about an aspect of your business (“High switching

costs prevent our customers from defecting”) and ask a diverse group if they hold

true.

Encourage debate by holding “safe zone” meetings where open dialogue and

conflict are expected and welcomed.

Create a rotating position for the express purpose of questioning the status quo.

Include naysayers in a decision process to surface challenges early.

Capture input from people not directly affected by a decision who may have a good

perspective on the repercussions.

Interpret Leaders who challenge in the right way invariably elicit complex and conflicting

information. That’s why the best ones are also able to interpret. Instead of

reflexively seeing or hearing what you expect, you should synthesize all the input

you have. You’ll need to recognize patterns, push through ambiguity, and seek new

insights. Finland’s former president J. K. Paasikivi was fond of saying that wisdom

begins by recognizing the facts and then “re-cognizing,” or rethinking, them to

expose their hidden implications.

Some years ago Liz, a U.S. food company CMO, was developing a marketing plan

for the company’s low-carb cake line. At the time, the Atkins diet was popular, and

every food company had a low-carb strategy. But Liz noticed that none of the

consumers she listened to were avoiding the company’s snacks because they were

on a low-carb diet. Rather, a fast-growing segment—people with diabetes—

shunned them because they contained sugar. Liz thought her company might

achieve higher sales if it began to serve diabetics rather than fickle dieters. Her

ability to connect the dots ultimately led to a profitable change in product mix from

low-carb to sugar-free cakes.

To improve your ability to interpret:

When analyzing ambiguous data, list at least three possible explanations for what

you’re observing and invite perspectives from diverse stakeholders.

Force yourself to zoom in on the details and out to see the big picture.

Actively look for missing information and evidence that disconfirms your

hypothesis.

Supplement observation with quantitative analysis.

Step away—go for a walk, look at art, put on nontraditional music, play Ping-Pong

—to promote an open mind.

Decide In uncertain times, decision makers may have to make tough calls with incomplete

information, and often they must do so quickly. But strategic thinkers insist on

multiple options at the outset and don’t get prematurely locked into simplistic

go/no-go choices. They don’t shoot from the hip but follow a disciplined process

that balances rigor with speed, considers the trade-offs involved, and takes both

short- and long-term goals into account. In the end, strategic leaders must have

the courage of their convictions—informed by a robust decision process.

Janet, an execution-oriented division president in a technology business, liked to

make decisions quickly and keep the process simple. This worked well when the

competitive landscape was familiar and the choices straightforward. Unfortunately

for her, the industry was shifting rapidly as nontraditional competitors from Korea

began seizing market share with lower-priced products.

Janet’s instinct was to make a strategic acquisition in a low-cost geography—a yes-

or-no proposition—to preserve the company’s competitive pricing position and

market share. As the plan’s champion, she pushed for a rapid green light, but

because capital was short, the CEO and the CFO resisted. Surprised by this, she

gathered the principals involved in the decision and challenged them to come up

with other options. The team elected to take a methodical approach and explored

the possibility of a joint venture or a strategic alliance. On the basis of that analysis,

Janet ultimately pursued an acquisition—but of a different company in a more

strategic market.

To improve your ability to decide:

Reframe binary decisions by explicitly asking your team, “What other options do

we have?”

Divide big decisions into pieces to understand component parts and better see

unintended consequences.

Tailor your decision criteria to long-term versus short-term projects.

Let others know where you are in your decision process. Are you still seeking

divergent ideas and debate, or are you moving toward closure and choice?

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Determine who needs to be directly involved and who can influence the success of

your decision.

Consider pilots or experiments instead of big bets, and make staged commitments.

Align Strategic leaders must be adept at finding

common ground and achieving buy-in

among stakeholders who have disparate

views and agendas. This requires active

outreach. Success depends on proactive

communication, trust building, and

frequent engagement.

One executive we worked with, a chemical company president in charge of the

Chinese market, was tireless in trying to expand his business. But he had difficulty

getting support from colleagues elsewhere in the world. Frustrated that they didn’t

share his enthusiasm for opportunities in China, he plowed forward alone, further

alienating them. A survey revealed that his colleagues didn’t fully understand his

strategy and thus hesitated to back him.

With our help, the president turned the situation around. He began to have regular

face-to-face meetings with his fellow leaders in which he detailed his growth plans

and solicited feedback, participation, and differing points of view. Gradually they

began to see the benefits for their own functions and lines of business. With greater

collaboration, sales increased, and the president came to see his colleagues as

strategic partners rather than obstacles.

To improve your ability to align:

HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically

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Communicate early and often to combat the two most common complaints in

organizations: “No one ever asked me” and “No one ever told me.”

Identify key internal and external stakeholders, mapping their positions on your

initiative and pinpointing any misalignment of interests. Look for hidden agendas

and coalitions.

Use structured and facilitated conversations to expose areas of misunderstanding

or resistance.

Reach out to resisters directly to understand their concerns and then address them.

Be vigilant in monitoring stakeholders’ positions during the rollout of your

initiative or strategy.

Recognize and otherwise reward colleagues who support team alignment.

Learn Strategic leaders are the focal point for organizational learning. They promote a

culture of inquiry, and they search for the lessons in both successful and

unsuccessful outcomes. They study failures—their own and their teams’—in an

open, constructive way to find the hidden lessons.

A team of 40 senior leaders from a pharmaceutical company, including the CEO,

took our Strategic Aptitude Self-Assessment and discovered that learning was their

weakest collective area of leadership. At all levels of the company, it emerged, the

tendency was to punish rather than learn from mistakes, which meant that leaders

often went to great lengths to cover up their own.

The CEO realized that the culture had to change if the company was to become

more innovative. Under his leadership, the team launched three initiatives: (1) a

program to publicize stories about projects that initially failed but ultimately led to

creative solutions; (2) a program to engage cross-divisional teams in novel

experiments to solve customer problems—and then report the results regardless of

outcome; (3) an innovation tournament to generate new ideas from across the

organization. Meanwhile, the CEO himself became more open in acknowledging

his missteps. For example, he described to a group of high potentials how his delay

in selling a stalled legacy business unit had prevented the enterprise from acquiring

a diagnostics company that would have expanded its market share. The lesson, he

explained, was that he should more readily cut losses on underperforming

investments. In time the company culture shifted toward more shared learning and

bolder innovation.

To improve your ability to learn:

Institute after-action reviews, document lessons learned from major decisions or

milestones (including the termination of a failing project), and broadly

communicate the resulting insights.

Reward managers who try something laudable but fail in terms of outcomes.

Conduct annual learning audits to see where decisions and team interactions may

have fallen short.

Identify initiatives that are not producing as expected and examine the root causes.

Are You a Strategic Leader? As you complete this assessment,

think about the work you have done

over the past year related to

developing new strategies, solving

business challenges, and making

complex decisions. Average your

scores for each of the six leadership

skills and then address your weakest

area first, following the

recommendations described in this

article and online.

Create a culture in which inquiry is valued and mistakes are viewed as learning

opportunities.Becoming a strategic leader means identifying weaknesses in the six

skills discussed above and correcting them. Our research shows that strength in

one skill cannot easily compensate for a deficit in another, so it is important to

methodically optimize all six abilities. The following test—a short version of our

Strategic Aptitude Assessment, which is available at hbrsurvey.decisionstrat.com—

can help reveal which areas require attention. For clearer and more useful results,

take the longer survey and ask colleagues—or at least your manager—to review and

comment on your answers..

A version of this article appeared in the January– February 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Paul J. H. Schoemaker is the former research director of the Wharton School’s Mack Institute and

a coauthor of Peripheral Vision (Harvard Business Review Press, 2006). He served as an adviser to the

Good Judgment Project.

Steve Krupp is Senior Managing Partner at Decision Strategies International, Inc.

Samantha Howland, a senior managing partner at DSI, leads its Executive and Leadership

Development Practice.

Related Topics: Leadership Development | Strategic Thinking | Managing Yourself

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TIM HARP a month ago

Hi Team, the links to the tests here are both broken – any chance of an update? Thanks, Chris

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The Structure of Phenotypic Personality Traits Lewis R. Goldberg

This personal historical article traces the development of the Big-Five factor structure, whose growing acceptance by personality researchers has profoundly influenced the scientific study of individual differences. The roots of this taxonomy lie in the lexical hypothesis and the insights of Sir Francis Gallon, the prescience of L. L. Thurstone, the legacy of Raymond B. Cattell, and the seminal analyses of Tupes and Christal. Paradoxically, the present popu- larity of this model owes much to its many critics, each of whom tried to replace it, but failed. In reaction, there have been a number of attempts to assimilate other models into the five-factor structure. Lately, some practical im- plications of the emerging consensus can be seen in such contexts as personnel selection and classification.

Once upon a time, we had no personalities (Mi- schel, 1968). Fortunately times change, and the past decade has witnessed an electrifying burst

of interest in the most fundamental problem of the field— the search for a scientifically compelling taxonomy of personality traits. More importantly, the beginning of a consensus is emerging about the general framework of such a taxonomic representation. As a consequence, the scientific study of personality dispositions, which had been cast into the doldrums in the 1970s, is again an intellec- tually vigorous enterprise poised on the brink of a solution to a scientific problem whose roots extend back at least to Aristotle.

The Lexical Hypothesis Sir Francis Galton may have been among the first sci- entists to recognize explicitly the fundamental "lexical hypothesis"—namely, that the most important individual differences in human transactions will come to be encoded as single terms in some or all of the world's languages. Moreover, Galton (1884) was certainly one of the first scientists to consult a dictionary as a means of estimating the number of personality-descriptive terms in the lexicon and to appreciate the extent to which trait terms share aspects of their meanings. Galton's estimate of the number of personality-related terms in English was later sharpened empirically, first by Allport and Odbert (1936), who culled such terms from the second edition of Webster's Un- abridged Dictionary, and later by Norman (1967), who supplemented the earlier list with terms from the third edition. Galton's insight concerning the relations among personality terms has been mirrored in efforts by later investigators to discover the nature of those relations, so as to construct a structural representation of personality descriptors.

One of the first of these investigators was L. L. Thur- stone, a pioneer in the development of factor analysis; the report of his initial findings reads today with almost haunting clairvoyance:

Sixty adjectives that are in common use for describing people . . . were given to each of 1300 raters. Each rater was asked to think of a person whom he knew well and to underline every adjective that he might use in a conversational description of that person. . . . the . . . correlation . . . coefficients for the sixty personality traits were then analyzed by means of multiple factor methods and we found that five [italics added] factors are sufficient to account for the coefficients.. . .

It is of considerable psychological interest to know that the whole list of sixty adjectives can be accounted for by postulating ony five independent common factors. . . . we did not foresee that the list could be accounted for by as few . . . factors. This fact leads us to surmise that the scientific description of person- ality may not be quite so hopelessly complex as it is sometimes thought to be [italics added]. (Thurstone, 1934, pp. 12-14)

The Big Five Curiously, Thurstone never followed up his early anal- ysis of these 60 adjectives and instead elected to rean- alyze the questionnaire scales developed by Guilford. Oblique rotations of 13 Guilford scales (Thurstone, 1951) led to the development of the seven factors in the Thurstone Temperament Schedule (Thurstone, 1953), two of whose scales intercorrelated over .70. Thur- stone's devotion to oblique rotations in factor analysis was mirrored by Raymond B. Cattell, who began his personality explorations with a perusal of the approx- imately 4,500 trait-descriptive terms included in the Allport and Odbert (1936) compendium. Cattell (1943) used this trait list as a starting point, eventually devel- oping a set of 35 highly complex bipolar variables, each pole of which included a composite set of adjectives and phrases. These variables were then used in various studies, in each of which the correlations among the

Lewis R. Goldberg is at the Department of Psychology, University of Oregon and at the Oregon Research Institute.

This article was a keynote address to the Sixth European Conference on Personality, sponsored by the European Association of Personality Psychology on June 16-19, 1992, in Groningen, The Netherlands. Work on this address was supported by Grant MH-39077 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

I am much indebted to Paul T. Costa, Jr., John M. Digman, Oliver P. John, Robert R. McCrae, Warren T. Norman, Dean Peabody, Gerard Saucier, Auke Tellegen, and Jerry S. Wiggins for their many thoughtful suggestions.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lewis R. Goldberg, Oregon Research Institute, 1899 Willamette Street, Eugene, OR 97401. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected].

26 January 1993 • American Psychologist Copyright 1993 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 00O3-O66X/93/S2.0O

Vol. 48, No. I, 26-34

variables were factored using oblique rotational pro- cedures (e.g., Cattell, 1947).

Cattell has repeatedly claimed to have identified at least a dozen oblique factors. However, when Cattell's variables were later analyzed by others, only five factors have proven to be replicable (e.g., Digman & Takemoto- Chock, 1981;Fiske, 1949; Norman, 1963; Smith, 1967; Tupes & Christal, 1961). Similar five-factor structures based on other sets of variables have been reported by a number of other investigators (e.g., Borgatta, 1964a; Dig- man & Inouye, 1986; Goldberg, 1990, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1985a, 1987), and these studies have now been reviewed extensively (e.g., Digman, 1990; John, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992; Wiggins &Pincus, 1992; Wiggins & Trapnell, in press).

These Big-Five factors have traditionally been num- bered and labeled, Factor I, Surgency (or Extraversion); Factor II, Agreeableness; Factor III, Conscientiousness; Factor IV, Emotional Stability (vs. Neuroticism); and Factor V, Culture.1 More recently, Factor V has been reinterpreted as Intellect (e.g., Digman & Takemoto- Chock, 1981; Peabody & Goldberg, 1989) and as Open- ness to Experience (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1987). Given the strong consensus that has been emerging about the general nature of the Big-Five domains, the disagreement about the specific nature of Factor V is somewhat of a scientific embarrassment.

Although there is some disagreement about the pre- cise nature of these five domains, there is widespread agreement that some aspects of the language of personality description can be organized hierarchically (e.g., Cantor & Mischel, 1979; Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1986). In such a representation, the Big-Five domains are located at the highest level that is still descriptive of behavior, with only general evaluation located at a higher and more abstract level (John, Hampson, & Goldberg, 1991). When thus viewed hierarchically, it should be clear that pro- ponents of the five-factor model have never intended to reduce the rich tapestry of personality to a mere five traits (e.g., Shweder & Sullivan, 1990). Rather, they seek to provide a scientifically compelling framework in which to organize the myriad individual differences that char- acterize humankind.

Indeed, these broad domains incorporate hundreds, if not thousands, of traits: Factor I (Surgency or Extra- version) contrasts such traits as talkativeness, assertive- ness, and activity level with traits such as silence, passivity, and reserve; Factor II (Agreeableness or Pleasantness) contrasts traits such as kindness, trust, and warmth with such traits as hostility, selfishness, and distrust; Factor III (Conscientiousness or Dependability) contrasts such traits as organization, thoroughness, and reliability with traits such as carelessness, negligence, and unreliability; Factor IV (Emotional Stability vs. Neuroticism) includes such traits as nervousness, moodiness, and temperamentality; and Factor V (whether labeled as Intellect or Openness to Experience) contrasts such traits as imagination, cu- riosity, and creativity with traits such as shallowness and imperceptiveness.

From Critic to Proponent

It might be argued that the hallmark of a compelling structural model is that it is initially disliked, thereby stimulating numerous attempts to replace it with some- thing more attractive—all of which fail. In any case, so it has been with the Big-Five model of perceived person- ality trait descriptors. Most of the present proponents of the model were once its critics, and some of its present critics contributed to its success. Indeed, as sympatheti- cally articulated by Wiggins and Trapnell (in press), the intellectual "father" of the Big-Five factors, Raymond Cattell, has consistently denied his paternity and has yet to embrace the model.

The Accidental Discoverer (Fiske)

Whereas Thurstone (1934) found the correct number of broad personality factors, his collection of 60 trait adjec- tives was too idiosyncratically assembled to have pro- duced today's Big-Five structure. Instead, the honor of first discovery must be accorded to Donald Fiske (1949), who analyzed a set of 22 variables developed by Cattell and found five factors that replicated across samples of self-ratings, observer ratings, and peer ratings. Fiske's la- bels for his factors, like those proposed by subsequent investigators, were never perfectly successful attempts to capture the prototypical content of these broad domains: Confident Self-Expression (I), Social Adaptability (II), Conformity (III), Emotional Control (IV), and Inquiring Intellect (V). Like Thurstone before him, however, Fiske did not follow up his initial findings. Indeed, these early histories read like that of Leif Erikson, who made one voyage of discovery, found a continent, but never re- turned.

The True Fathers (Tupes and Christal)

To the extent that anyone other than Cattell deserves the real credit for initiating this complex saga, that honor belongs to Tupes and Christal (1958, 1961), who analyzed the findings from a number of studies that used sets of variables developed by Cattell (including Fiske, 1949) and found five replicable factors. Their classic 1961 Air Force technical report has now been reprinted (Tupes & Chris- tal, 1992), along with an appreciatory editorial by McCrae (1992) and a historical introduction by Christal (1992). In the latter, Christal described the remarkable series of U.S. Air Force studies carried out between 1954 and 1961, including investigations of the long-term predictive valid-

1 As was pointed out by Peabody and Goldberg (1989), the inter- pretation of Factor V as Culture arose from a historical accident: Al- though Cattell had initially constructed a subset of variables relating to Intellect, in the seminal studies of Cattell (1947) he omitted all of those variables in favor of an intelligence test. In turn, this test was omitted from his later studies, leaving no direct representation of most Intellect variables. In their absence, Factor V was called Culture by Tupes and Christal (1961) and some later investigators. However, when variables related to Intellect were reintroduced (e.g., Goldberg, 1990), it became clear that Intellect was the more appropriate label for the fifth broad factor.

January 1993 • American Psychologist 27

ity of peer ratings, a study of the effect of length of ac- quaintance on the accuracy of such ratings, a comparison of the factor structures derived from variables presented in three different response formats, and—of course—the seminal comparisons of factor structures across diverse samples.

Other Early Explorers (Borgatta and Smith)

Borgatta (1964a, 1964b) and Smith (1967, 1969) both reacted to the work of Tupes and Christal (1958, 1961) with their own independent studies and found much the same five-factor structure. Borgatta (1964a) compared the structures derived from self-ratings with those from peer rankings and peer ratings in two samples and found five robust factors, which he labeled Assertiveness (I), Lik- ability (II), Responsibility (HI), Emotionality (IV), and Intelligence (V). Smith (1967) compared the structures derived from three large samples (TV = 583, 521, and 324) and found five robust factors, which he labeled Extraver- sion (I), Agreeableness (II), Strength of Character (HI), Emotionality (IV), and Refinement (V); moreover, Smith found that scores derived from the Strength of Character factor correlated .43 with college grades. In a later peer- nomination study, Smith (1969) recovered Factors I-IV in male and female samples at both the junior high school and high school levels; moreover, he found high corre- lations with smoking status, smoking being negatively re- lated to Factors II (Agreeableness) and III (Strength of Character), and positively related to Factor I (Extraver- sion). Neither investigator, however, seems to have carried out any systematic follow-up research, and their role in the history of the Big-Five factors is now typically rele- gated to a footnote.

The First Serious Critic (Norman)

Warren Norman, often erroneously labeled the father of the Big-Five structure, spent much of his early research career as a skeptic. Paradoxically, although his importance in the history of the five-factor model is universally ac- knowledged, his refusal to become a true believer has typically been overlooked. Yet, after his seminal studies confirming the five-factor model with a selected set of Cattell variables (Norman, 1963), he instituted an exten- sive research program aimed at replacing that model with a more comprehensive one. He began by expanding the corpus of English personality terms assembled by Allport and Odbert (1936), then classifying the terms in the ex- panded pool into such categories as states, traits, and roles, and finally collecting normative information about some 2,800 trait-descriptive terms (Norman, 1967). Norman was convinced that because of the inevitable computa- tional and other technical limitations of research in the 1930s and 1940s, Cattell's variables left much to be de- sired, and therefore that studies using a representative subset of the total English personality-trait lexicon would uncover dimensions beyond the Big Five. Although Nor- man himself never tested this appealing conjecture, others did (e.g., Goldberg, 1990), and it has proven to be wrong.

The Second Serious Critic (Digman)

The first computer was coming to the University of Ha- waii, and John Digman (an experimental psychologist with no interest in either personality or developmental psychology) set out to learn to program it. As an initial data set to be used to test his ability to program the new machine, Digman decided to try to replicate the child personality factors obtained by Cattell and Coan (1957), inasmuch as he had easy access to teacher ratings at Ha- waii's University Laboratory School. Using the Cattell variables, Digman believed he had found eight oblique factors, some of which differed from those found by Cat- tell and Coan.2 Intrigued by the discrepant findings, Dig- man (1965) conducted a second teacher-rating study, adding new variables to the original set. Some of Digman's 10 new oblique factors matched neither those from Cattell and Coan nor those from his own first study (Digman, 1963). In an attempt to make sense of these dissonant findings, Digman reanalyzed the data from a number of previous studies of teachers' ratings of children and con- cluded that 7 oblique factors were robust across the sam- ples (Digman, 1972). In further studies, using different sets of variables, Digman became convinced that there were at least 10 oblique factors of child personality (and perhaps more at the adult level), a view he espoused as recently as 1977.

In the spring of 1978, however, Digman was to teach a course in factor analysis, for which he obtained a num- ber of correlation matrices from classic studies of abilities and personality traits, including those previously analyzed by Tupes and Christal (1961) and by Norman (1963). Before providing them to his students for reanalysis, however, he checked them carefully and found clerical errors in the matrices of two of Cattell's studies. More importantly, he discovered that when six or more factors were rotated from the various matrices, the factors did not correspond, whereas when five factors were rotated, there was striking interstudy correspondence (Digman & Takemoto-Chock, 1981). Having set out to prove the cor- rectness of a 10-factor model, Digman regretfully became convinced of the robustness of the Big Five. Later teacher- rating research by Digman and Inouye (1986) again ob- tained the Big-Five factors, now with a revised set of child personality variables.

More Recent Critics (Peabody and Goldberg)

Like Cattell, both Norman and Digman had initially as- sumed that the dimensionality of phenotypic personality traits was quite large—certainly larger than five. The social psychologist Dean Peabody, on the other hand, had used trait-descriptive adjectives in a series of trait-inference

2 An interesting historical footnote: Digman presented these findings at a meeting attended by Cattell, who requested a copy of Digman's correlations. Without notifying Digman, Cattell then re-factored these correlations, rotated 12 oblique factors (which he claimed replicated his own), and published his solution before Digman had submitted his own report for publication (Digman, 1963). Indeed, Digman only discovered Cattell's (1963) article when he was sent a reprint.

28 January 1993 • American Psychologist

studies, in each of which he uncovered only three broad dimensions. Peabody's ideas and procedures were ingen- ious: Using a dictionary as a starting place, Peabody (1967) concocted various sets of four terms, so that within each set the descriptive and evaluative aspects of trait meanings were systematically unconfounded. For ex- ample, one set of four included the traits generous, thrifty, extravagant, and stingy—the first two traits being desir- able and the last two undesirable, the first and third re- ferring to loose features and the second and fourth to tight features descriptively. Subjects made trait inferences within each set of four traits (e.g., If one is generous, how likely is one to be thrifty [same evaluative valence but opposite as descriptively] as compared with extravagant [opposite valence but similar descriptively]?).

In a series of factor analyses of subjects' trait infer- ences across various sets of traits, Peabody (1967, 1970, 1978, 1984) uncovered a dimension of general evaluation, plus two descriptive dimensions, which he labeled asser- tiveness and tight versus loose (impulse control versus expressiveness). In other studies, Peabody (1968, 1985) applied this model to national characteristics, finding widespread agreement on the descriptive features asso- ciated with a particular nationality, but disagreement on the evaluations (e.g., We are thrifty [generous], whereas they are stingy [extravagant]).

Although Peabody's three-factor structure had little impact on the general field of personality structure, it had a profound impact on my own thinking. Both Peabody and Norman were among my closest professional col- leagues, and I followed their divergent paths with growing consternation. Peabody appeared to become increasingly wedded to his three-factor model, whereas Norman (and later Digman) were convincing many of us that there must be at least five orthogonal trait dimensions. How was one to reconcile these two structural representations? On the one hand, one could simply disregard Peabody's three- factor model in favor of the more inclusive five-factor structure. On the other hand, to my scientific tastes, the Peabody model was elegant and beautiful, whereas the five-factor structure was an aesthetic nightmare: All of the Big-Five factors but the first (Surgency) were highly related to evaluation, and the dimensions themselves had little appeal to me. In contrast, the Peabody model iso- lated general evaluation as an important dimension of personality perception (which seemed logically compel- ling), thereby assuring that the remaining dimensions would be evaluation free (which seemed desirable). Moreover, although Peabody has forcefully and consis- tently denied any similarities between his three factors and the three E-P-A (evaluation, potency, and activity) dimensions of affective meaning discovered in the se- mantic-differential studies of Osgood, Suci, and Tannen- baum (1957), I was far from convinced. General evalu- ation is identical in both representations, whereas potency and activity in the Osgood model share important features with Peabody's dimensions of assertiveness and impulse expression. I found these theoretical links intriguing.

In my early work (e.g., Goldberg, 1982), I cham- pioned the Peabody model over the Big Five. I expanded on the general idea behind Peabody's sets of four traits to develop clusters of quasi-synonyms and quasi-anto- nyms grouped into tables we called Peabody plots, in which descriptively similar trait adjectives were listed on the right-hand side of a page, all their antonyms were listed in the left-hand side, and all terms of both types were ordered vertically by their evaluations (indexed by their mean social desirability values from Norman, 1967). Using a variety of different sets of terms, I produced nine rounds of taxonomies of trait-descriptive adjectives (Goldberg, 1982), as well as a taxonomy of trait-descrip- tive nouns (Goldberg, 1980a).

However, at the same time as I was developing these essentially armchair taxonomies, I was administering large sets of trait-descriptive adjectives to samples of sub- jects for self-ratings, peer ratings, or both ("external" data) and administering smaller subsets of trait adjectives to other samples for ratings of semantic similarity ("inter- nal" data). During the decade roughly from 1975 to 1985, I was continuously carrying out analyses of these various data sets in an effort to discover a scientifically compelling taxonomic structure. It was as if I were looking through a glass darkly: In each analysis, I would discover some variant of the Big-Five factors, no two analyses exactly the same, no analysis so different from the rest that I couldn't recognize the hazy outlines of the five domains. For nearly a decade I wandered as if in a fog, never certain how to reconcile the differences obtained from analysis to analysis.

During all of that period I kept searching for a short- hand notational system for labeling variants of the Big Five—something akin to the names of classic chess po- sitions—so that for each analysis I would have a way to refer to its particular factor locations. Ultimately, I wanted to link each of the particular Big-Five variants I had been finding with characteristics of the data—such as the type of item pool, the nature of the subject sample, the use of unipolar as compared with bipolar variables, and the kind of data-analytic procedure. In the absence of such a no- tational system, I published none of the findings from my structural analyses, but continued to collect additional data and reflect on the findings from each new analysis.3

These analyses eventually led me away from my in- fatuation with the three Peabody factors; I couldn't shake the fact that analyses of any reasonably representative pool of common trait adjectives always provided evidence for five broad factors, rather than for three. Peabody, on the other hand, was still not convinced. To resolve our disagreement, Peabody proposed that we mutually agree on a representative set of bipolar trait scales and then that

3 Some of these analyses of my inventories of 566 and 587 adjectives were presented at a Western Psychological Association symposium or- ganized by John Digman (Goldberg, 1980b) and then eventually pub- lished in Goldberg (1990), whereas some of the findings from smaller item pools, including both bipolar and unipolar Big-Five factor markers, were published in Goldberg (1992).

January 1993 • American Psychologist 29

we apply that representative set in a variety of samples of external and internal data. The representative set of scales was developed by Peabody (1987), and the findings from our analyses of those scales in seven data sets were reported in Peabody and Goldberg (1989). In that article, we showed that the factor structures derived from external and internal data were quite similar, but not identical, and that they included five (external) or six (internal) or- thogonal dimensions. Moreover, we were able to incor- porate the three Peabody factors into the Big-Five struc- ture.

What was still unclear to me, however, was how to secure agreement on the exact positioning of the factor axes in this five-dimensional space. In analyses of external data, the simple-structure position as obtained by varimax rotation will inevitably vary somewhat from sample to sample, even when the same variables are analyzed; one probably needs samples of around 1,000 or more to at- tenuate such intersample perturbations. Moreover, the simple-structure position is affected enormously by the selection of variables, and no increase in sample size can counteract the effect of this important determinant of factor location. In addition, as Peabody and Goldberg (1989) have demonstrated, the simple-structure location will change as a function of the evaluative homogeneity versus heterogeneity of the targets being described (e.g., self-ratings or ratings of friends vs. ratings of both liked and disliked targets). And, as the analyses reported in Goldberg (1992) suggested, factor locations may depend on whether the ratings are obtained using unipolar or bipolar scales.

In a way, this situation is similar to that faced by early cartographers as they struggled to provide maps of the emerging world. Because the earth is a sphere, any set of orthogonal three-dimensional coordinates could be used to map that world with equal precision. And, just as cartographers eventually settled on a standard system with north-south and east-west axes, so personality re- searchers must settle on a standard set of locations for the Big-Five dimensions. My efforts to develop factor markers (Goldberg, 1992) are meant to be a step in that direction. Ultimately, the field will form a consensus about the "best" factor locations, a consensus that will be in- fluenced by both aesthetic and practical considerations (Briggs, 1992).4

The Assimilators (Costa/McCrae and Wiggins)

At present, one could argue that there are two five-factor models, one developed by McCrae and Costa (1985a, 1987) and operationalized in the NEO Personality In- ventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985) and the other associated with studies based on the lexical hypothesis and operationalized in the sets of factor markers provided by Norman (1963), Peabody and Goldberg (1989), Gold- berg (1990, 1992), John (1989), Trapnell and Wiggins (1990), and Digman and his associates (e.g., Digman, 1989; Digman & Inouye, 1986). Much is the same in both models: (a) The number of dimensions is identical, namely five; (b) the content of Factor IV is essentially the

same, although it is oriented in the opposite direction in the two models and is thus so labeled (Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism); and (c) there is considerable simi- larity, although not identity, in the content of Factor III (Conscientiousness). On the other hand, at least two of the differences between the models are quite striking: (a) The locations of Factors I and II are systematically rotated so that warmth is a facet of Extraversion in the NEO-PI, whereas it is a facet of Agreeableness in the lexical model; and (b) Factor V is conceived as Openness to Experience in the NEO-PI and as Intellect or Imagination in the lexical model.5

These differences stem from the history of the NEO- PI, which started out as a questionnaire measure of a three-factor model, including only Neuroticism, Extra- version, and Openness to Experience. Whereas other three-factor theorists, such as Eysenck (1991), have stood firm as proponents of their original representations, Costa and McCrae reacted to the events of the early 1980s with such remarkable openness to experience that by the end of the decade these investigators had become the world's most prolific and most influential proponents of the five- factor model. Their startling transformation was initially stimulated by two papers from a Digman-organized sym- posium at the 1980 Western Psychological Association convention—the first by Digman and Takemoto-Chock (1981) and the second by me (Goldberg, 1980b)—plus two chapters I published at that time (Goldberg, 1981, 1982). As a reaction to those reports, in 1983 Costa and McCrae invited me to visit them in Baltimore, where I presented the findings from my first studies of bipolar factor markers. My efforts to convince them that five or- thogonal factors were necessary to account for phenotypic personality differences (Goldberg, 1983) fell on receptive ears; indeed, they had already administered 40 of my factor markers, along with 40 new rating scales of their own, to their longitudinal sample, and we discussed the preliminary findings during my visit. The rest, as they say, is history (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1985a, 1987). Two

4 One such quasi-aesthetic consideration has guided my own work. It has long been known that the evaluation, potency, and activity (E-P- A) dimensions of Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) are only or- thogonal when a heterogeneous set of concepts are rated on a hetero- geneous set of bipolar rating scales, and thus the judgments are primarily metaphorical rather than descriptive. Specifically, when the concepts are all real persons, the dimensions of potency and activity tend to fuse into a construct called dynamism by the Osgood team. Surgency (Factor I) in my preferred rotation of the Big-Five structure represents this fusion of assertiveness and activity level, which explains its relative independence of evaluation.

5 Actually, the differences between the two versions of the five-factor model can be attenuated in the following ways: (a) The trait descriptor warm has been classified in Facet II+/I+ in some Abridged Big-Five- dimensional Circumplex (AB5C; Hofstee, de Raad, & Goldberg, 1992) analyses in the lexical model, whereas warmth is considered a I+/II+ facet in the McCrae and Costa model, suggesting more agreement when both primary and secondary loadings are considered than when one considers the primary loadings alone, (b) As suggested by Saucier (in press), neither the labels Openness nor Intellect capture well the central cluster of traits that define Factor V; perhaps a more apt label is Imag- ination for a factor defined by such traits as creativity and curiosity.

30 January 1993 • American Psychologist

of the Big-Five dimensions, Factor II (Agreeableness) and Factor III (Conscientiousness) were grafted onto their original three-scale structure to form their present model.

The prodigious outpouring of reports by McCrae and Costa probably did more to form the modern con- sensus about personality structure than anything else that occurred during the 1980s. Specifically, they used the NEO-PI scales as a framework for integrating a wide va- riety of other questionnaire scales, including those de- veloped by Eysenck (McCrae & Costa, 1985b), Jackson (Costa & McCrae, 1988a), Spielberger (Costa & McCrae, 1987), and Wiggins (McCrae & Costa, 1989b), as well as the scales included in the Minnesota Multiphasic Per- sonality Inventory (Costa, Busch, Zonderman, & McCrae, 1986) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (McCrae & Costa, 1989a). For additional reports of this team, in- cluding those describing the revised NEO-PI (NEO-PI- R), see Costa and McCrae (1988b, 1992, in press); Costa, McCrae, and Dye (1991); and McCrae and Costa (1992). Indeed, so persuasive has been the McCrae and Costa team that some scientists who originally worked in the lexical tradition, such as Oliver John and Jerry Wiggins, have adopted their interpretation of Factor V (Openness rather than Intellect).

During the past decade, Wiggins (1979, 1980, 1982) had confined most of his empirical research to the In- terpersonal Circle, which is based on Factors I and II in the five-factor model, and over the years Wiggins and his students (e.g., Wiggins, Trapnell, & Phillips, 1988) have devised Interpersonal Adjective Scales to measure the eight octants within this circular structure. One limitation of this strategy is that a substantial number of traits are not captured by the model. In addition, it is difficult to ensure that traits that have been included in the plane that defines the Interpersonal Circle should not more aptly be classified in one of the missing planes. To remedy these problems, Trapnell and Wiggins (1990) have constructed additional scales to measure the other three factors. As a consequence, Wiggins's present scales include multiple measures associated with Factors I and II, plus single measures of Factors HI, IV, and V.

The Yef-To-Be-Convinced

An emerging consensus is not the same as universal agreement; there are those who do not accept the Big- Five factor structure. Indeed, the two most famous holdouts, Cattell and Eysenck, share little but their op- position to the five-factor model. Cattell remains con- vinced that there are far more factors than five, whereas Eysenck is certain that five is too many. Specifically, Eysenck (1991, 1992) has argued that Factor II (Agree- ableness) and Factor III (Conscientiousness) in the Big- Five representation are merely facets of the higher level construct of Psychoticism in his three-factor P-E-N (Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism) model. Goldberg and Rosolack (in press) have shown that Psy- choticism as measured by the P-scale in the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) is a blend of orthog- onal Factors II and HI. Moreover, the documented un-

reliability of the P-scale stems from the fact that its items are rather equally spaced over the 90° arc between the poles of the two orthogonal factors. Eysenck (in press) argued that Psychoticism is a more viable con- struct than either Agreeableness or Conscientiousness because scores on his P-scale are significantly related to a wide variety of other variables. Goldberg and Ro- solack (in press) noted that any variable, A, that is formed out of two others, B and C, will inevitably relate to all variables associated with B, with C, or with both. A convincing solution to this seemingly intractable controversy merits a Nobel Prize.

Moreover, Eysenck is not alone in his disdain for the Big-Five model. For example, Jack Block has been a consistent supporter of his two-factor model (Ego Control and Ego Resiliency). Whereas Block has clearly been in- fluenced by the five-factor representation, another recent theorist, Robert Cloninger (1987), introduced his dimen- sions of harm avoidance, novelty seeking, and reward dependence with no acknowledgment of any more com- prehensive representation. And, to add to the cacophony, Zuckerman (1992, in press) has introduced his own five- factor model and Hogan (1986) has provided a six-factor variant of the Big Five.

Some Practical Implications Back in the days when we had no personalities (Mischel, 1968), it made no sense to use personality measures in personnel selection. Now that we have regained our per- sonalities, evidence has been accruing about the utility of personality measures as predictors of diverse criteria (e.g., Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp, & McCloy, 1990). Recently, both qualitative (e.g., Hogan, 1991; Schmidt & Ones, 1992) and quantitative (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991) reviews of the literature have concluded that personality measures, when classified within the Big-Five domains, are systematically related to a variety of criteria of job performance. For example, Barrick and Mount concluded that

The results of the present study have implications for both re- search and practice in personnel selection. From a practitioner's standpoint, the results suggest that if the purpose is to predict job performance based on an individual's personality, then those measures associated with Conscientiousness [Factor HI in the five-factor model] are most likely to be valid predictors for all jobs. In fact, it is difficult to conceive of a job in which the traits associated with the Conscientiousness dimension would not contribute to job success [italics added], (pp. 21-22)

Interestingly, the meta-analytic review of Tett et al. (1991), although clearly confirming that "personality measures have a place in personnel selection research" (p. 732), concluded that personality measures related to Factor II (Agreeableness) in the Big-Five model were most highly related to criteria of job performance. This incon- sistency in the findings between two large-scale quanti- tative reviews of a similar body of literature is befuddling, and signals the need for more precise and differentiated research on personality-performance relations. Indeed, Tett et al. concluded,

January 1993 • American Psychologist 31

Our optimism [about the promise of personality measures in personnel selection] derives not only from the overall positive findings obtained in the present study, but also from perceived correctable weaknesses in current validation practices. In par- ticular, we believe the full potential of personality traits in per- sonnel selection will be realized only when confirmatory research strategies employing personality-oriented job analysis become the standard practice for determining which traits are relevant to predicting performance on a given job, and when greater attention is directed to the selection of psychometrically sound [and] construct valid personality measures, (p. 732)

Research on the relations between personality traits and job performance is now of absolutely crucial impor- tance for the optimal deployment of human resources. First of all, recent findings demonstrate quite clearly that some personality measures can provide substantial in- cremental validities over cognitive measures for the pre- diction of a variety of job-related criteria (McHenry, Hough, Toquam, Hanson, & Ashworth, 1990). In addi- tion, unlike most cognitive measures, personality scales tend to have little if any differential impact on protected groups, and thus they are less prone to raise discrimi- natory concerns (Hogan, 1991). Moreover, although there is no doubt that most personality measures can be dis- torted when subjects are instructed to fake their responses, the admittedly scanty available evidence suggests that the vast majority of genuine job applicants appear to refrain from such response distortion (e.g., Hough et al., 1990); for a review of this literature in a more specific context, see Goldberg, Grenier, Guion, Sechrest, and Wing (1991).

In summary, there is widespread agreement that noncognitive factors are heavily implicated in many, if not most, aspects of job-related performance. Intellec- tually able individuals falter on the job when their per- sonality traits are not congruent with task requirements. During the decade of the 1990s, research must focus on the development of (a) personality-oriented job analyses,

(b) reliable measures of job-related personality traits, and (c) optimal procedures for linking applicants' personality profiles with job requirements. The Big-Five model of personality traits should prove useful as a framework for each of these three problems. In the words of Barrick and Mount (1991),

In order for any field of science to advance, it is necessary to have an accepted classification scheme for accumulating and categorizing empirical findings. We believe that the robustness of the 5-factor model provides a meaningful framework for for- mulating and testing hypotheses relating individual differences in personality to a wide range of criteria in personnel psychology, especially in the subfields of personnel selection, performance appraisal, and training and development, (p. 23)

Once upon a time, we had no personalities. Is it not exciting to see their return?

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