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On the Applicability of the Big Five Implicit Association Test in Organizational Settings

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Abstract

Two studies were conducted with the aim of investigating whether the Big Five traits, as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT), predict supervisor ratings of job performance. Two incumbent groups composed respectively by 52 security guards (Study 1) and 71 semi-skilled workers (Study 2) completed a self-report measure of the Big-Five and five IATs for assessing the same personality dimensions in an implicit way. In study 1, job performance was positively related to self-ratings of energy/extraversion (r = .35, p < .01), agreeableness (r = .25, p < .01), and conscientiousness (r = .22, p < .05), and to the implicit measure of conscientiousness (r = .27, p < .05). In study 2, job performance was positively related to explicit conscientiousness (r = .26, p < .05) and emotional stability (r = .26, p < .05), and to the implicit counterparts of the same traits (r = .25, p < .05, for conscientiousness, and r = .24, p < .05, for emotional stability). These relations held after controlling for the effect of pure valence, as measured by implicit self-esteem (Study 2). In both studies, implicit and explicit measures of personality traits predict unique aspects of job performance (i.e. they have incremental validity over each other). Practical implications of findings and future research directions are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Data from both studies partially overlaps with data used in a recent study aimed at investigating the fakability of implicit measures of the Big Five (masked). The present research is new in that it focuses on a different aim and includes supervisory ratings of job performance.

  2. Specifically, we assessed the consistency of agreement using the two-way random effects model (ICC 2,1).

  3. Given the available sample size, it was not statistically appropriate to include all traits in a single equation. As recommended by Tabachnick and Fidell (2007), a sample of size of at least 50 + 8(k) is needed for testing a full regression model, where k is the number of predictors.

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Acknowledgments

The first author thanks the Humboldt university of Berlin for its hospitability during the writing of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Michele Vecchione, Francesco Dentale, Guido Alessandri, Maria Tindara Imbesi & Claudio Barbaranelli

  2. Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Michele Vecchione

  3. International Psychoanalytic University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Konrad Schnabel

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  1. Michele Vecchione
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  2. Francesco Dentale
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  3. Guido Alessandri
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  4. Maria Tindara Imbesi
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  5. Claudio Barbaranelli
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  6. Konrad Schnabel
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Correspondence to Michele Vecchione.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Vecchione, M., Dentale, F., Alessandri, G. et al. On the Applicability of the Big Five Implicit Association Test in Organizational Settings. Curr Psychol 36, 665–674 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9455-x

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