PERSONALITY AND JOB PERFORMANCE: A CRITIQUE OF THE TETT, JACKSON, AND ROTHSTEIN (1991) META-ANALYSIS

Tett, Jackson, and Rothstein (1991) recently presented a meta-analysis of the relationship between personality and job performance. Many of their findings, particularly those pertaining to the Big Five personality dimensions, are at odds with one other large scale meta-analytic study (Barrick & Mount, 1991) investigating the relation between personality and performance. In order to reconcile these new results with previous findings, we examined differences in the sample sizes used, the process for assigning pre-existing scales to personality dimensions, and the nature of the jobs investigated. In addition, we found four technical errors in the Tett et al. moderator meta-analyses in computing sampling error, the bias correction, sampling error for bias corrected correlations, and computing sampling error variance across studies. These errors raise serious questions about the interpretation of their results for various moderators of the personality-job performance relationship.