Conscientiousness: a Review

Thus, conscientiousness is identified as being a contributory characteristic, having an indirect influence on the well-being of an individual (McCrae & Costa, 1991; DeNeve & Cooper, 1998).

Guilford (1959) defines personality traits as being ‘any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual varies from another’. Subsequently, trait theory can be identified as an approach to the study of human personality. The aim of psychologists, specifically trait theorists, is to explain similarities and differences between individuals based on traits. Although numerous psychologists differ on the amount of traits that are significant, each theorist categorizes personality traits along several broad type spectrums. This assignment will focus on comparing and contrasting Eysenck’s Hierarchical Theory of Personality and Costa and McRae’s Five Factor Model (FFM), two different trait theories of personality.

the five personality factor theory, as well as the theories on which it is based.

The five-factor model (FFM) is a contemporary construct describing personality. It incorporates five traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism also referred to as OCEAN. Within each dimension, there are specific personality attributes, for example, openness includes subcategories of feelings and actions. The FFM was influenced by Cattell’s 16-factor model (1957) and shares traits with many other personality theories such as Eysenck’s PEN model. There has been an ongoing debate discussing how many factors appropriately represent the brain structure of personality, suggestions have varied from 2-7, recently Almagor et al. (1995) advocated that a 7-factor model unfolds when evaluative traits are involved. Costa & Mcrae (1992) claim that the FFM is the best theory of personality, however, the model has received much criticism. Through examining different aspects of the model its credibility can be explored.

The NEO Personality Inventory-3 (NEO-PI-3) is a personality inventory that measures the big five personality traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (Whiston, 2013, p.221). These traits have been found to be universal in nature making the big five appropriate for use by other cultures and backgrounds due to

The NEO- PI-R is a self -administered questionnaire based on the Five Factor Model. The NEO PI-R is considered to be a concise measure of the five factor domains of personality (Costa & McCrae, 19921). It contains six traits or facets in each of the five domains. The domains are Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (Costa & McCrae, 19921). These domains help to provide an assessment of a normal adult personality. The test consists of 240 items and three validity items (Costa & McCrae, 19921). The test requires at least a sixth grade reading level. Included in the NEO PI-R test manual is the NEO Five Factor Inventory. This inventory was validated in the four studies conducted by Holden, Wasylkiw, Starzyk, Book and Edwards (2006) in their article about the construct validity of the big four personality clusters.

Description. Conscientiousness was defined as desire to do well and hard-working. Individuals with this trait was shown to be vigilant (Rose, Murphy, Byard, & Nikzad, 2002), organized, determined, goal-directed with tasks (Jackson, Wood, Bogg, Walton, Harms, & Roberts). Individuals who score low in this trait was regarded as disorganized, impulsive, non-persistent with tasks.

There is a lot of support for the FFM and its solid foundation for an adequate personality psychology including consistency in results from different researchers using different methods, the stability of the five factors and its application both within and outside of psychology. Two psychologists that support the validity of the FFM are Eysenck and Cattell. Eysenck’s PEN model includes only three factors (extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism) but with a similar hierarchal structure as the FFM. That is that individuals can rate from extremes on each factor.

For psychologists, one of the more popular theories espoused is the trait approach to personality, or “the idea that people have consistent personality characteristics that can be measured and studied” (Kalat, 2002, 512). However there are several problems that arise. First, there are significant cross-cultural differences, so one set of personality traits for one culture may differ considerably for another. The next problem would concern the creation of a test that could accurately measure these traits. While psychologists have for the most part addressed these issues, I will focus on the latter of the two. There has been a

Conscientiousness measures the degree to which people are careful, organized, task-oriented, reliable, disciplined. My percentile for conscientiousness, 92, came to be as high as I anticipated it would be. Ever since the first grade, I remember myself being highly organized and a reliable student/daughter/friend. Accomplishing the tasks and meeting the deadlines were always prioritized over everything else since I could not simply put my mind to rest knowing that I have not completed what I was asked, or told to do.

McCrae and Costa developed a personality test, the NEO Personality Inventory (Schultz, 2015, p. 231). According to this model, a “factor” is large and biologically based; is stable over your lifetime; appears in many cultures; are valid predictors of emotions and behaviors in many situations and can influence many aspects of our behavior (Schultz, 2015, p. 243)

The FFM when further split into six facets allows a broader analysis of the personality traits providing an advantage if the questions were translated into the Inuktitut language. The translated single item test when tested

To understand personality there are three main aspects that must be looked at: LArsen and Buss Definition of personality, The Six Domains of knowledge of personality, and Costa and McCrae's Five Factor Theory. In this essay I will first break down larsen and Buss definition and connect it to the domains, then connect the domains to the five factor thoery (FFT).

In the discipline of personality psychology, it is crucial for researchers to conduct studies using universal terms and scales, so that they may effectively compare results and further their line of research. However, when it concerns personality traits, such a comprehensive catalogue has not always been available – in fact, it has taken until up until the late 20th century to develop a list of essential personality traits and create scales that measure these dimensions reliably (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). The current set of these widely used traits is called the “Big Five” personality traits, and encompasses five broad dimensions - Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. Of the five, this paper will focus on Conscientiousness, a trait that describes individuals with impulse control who are highly organized, thorough, planful, efficient, responsible, reliable, and dependable, to name just a handful of characteristics associated with the trait (John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). Those low in the trait, on the other hand, are more frequently careless and irresponsible (McShane & Steen, 2012). Although studies have shown Conscientiousness to be a predictor of various life outcomes such as health and longevity, this paper will focus on the findings that support Conscientiousness as a predictor of job performance and, when one is high in the trait, success in

The original International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) focused on Goldberg’s 100-adjective markers of the psycholexical FFM structure (Goldberg, 1990/1992). The current IPIP-50 is a 50-item prototype public domain (the NEO-PI-R is a commercial questionnaire) personality questionnaire (Goldberg et al., 2006; Goldberg, 2011). Since the questionnaire is free of charge over 600 different studies have employed it (Goldberg, 2016). Until 2005 the IPIP big-five factor markers lacked validating evidence, but research conducted in 2005 found that the IPIP-50 had a high internal consistency and related strongly to both Costa and McCrae’s NEO-FFI and Eysenck’s EPQ-R Short Form (Gow et al., 2005). In addition, Gow et al. (2005) found that although Intellect and Openness related less strong, it was still 0.59. A study carried out in New Zealand found that there was hardly any evidence to suggest hidden biases at the item or scale level of the IPIP-50 (Guenole & Chernyshenko, 2005). Before looking at the research examining the relation between the FFM and EI, this literature review first presents some of the current findings in EI.