The big five traits and job performance: Understanding the mediators

From a human resource perspective, improving job performance has undoubtedly become a pertinent issue to many, including both organisations and employees. Organisations of today seek to discover ways to boost employees’ performance to enhance its success while employees may aim to perform at the highest level to attain a sense of self-fulfillment. As such, understanding the construct of job performance is vital. Job performance can be classified into three domains — task performance, organisational citizenship behaviour and counterproductive work behaviour. This literature review introduces the concept of the Big Five traits, in an attempt to explain how these traits in employees corresponds to job performance levels. For instance, conscientiousness is one of the most sought-after personality trait in organisational research (Barrick, Mount, & Strauss, 1993). To illustrate how this trait-performance relationship actually operates, several mediators are identified via a thorough literature search. Self-efficacy and goals were deemed to be more important in the trait-performance link as compared to the other mediators. Included in this paper are also in-depth evaluations for each identified mediator. Above all, we concluded that organisations should consider addressing mediators under the classification of “cognitive processes” and henceforth take appropriate actions to translate personality traits into optimal job performance levels.Bachelor of Art