Linking personality to helping behaviors at work: an interactional perspective

Previous efforts to elucidate dispositional antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviors have yielded equivocal results. The current study presents and tests a theoretical argument for expecting conscientiousness to interact with interpersonal dimensions of personality in predicting helping behaviors. As hypothesized, the responses of 374 women and their supervisors reveal significant interactions between conscientiousness, on the one hand, and agreeableness, extraversion, and emotional stability, on the other, in predicting helping behaviors. Clarifying the relationship between personality and helping, these results suggest that the impact of conscientiousness in a social context depends on a positive interpersonal orientation. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Happiness Inducing Behaviors in Everyday Life: An Empirical Assessment of “The How of Happiness”

The frequency of Happiness Inducing Behaviors (HIB) was assessed in a survey of 903 university students; measures of Big Five personality traits and happiness were also obtained. Students reported engaging in many HIBs about 1–3 times per week. Analysis of HIB yielded three factors: Positive/Proactive Behaviors; Spiritual Behaviors; and Physical Health Behaviors. Positive/Proactive behaviors predicted significant additional variance in happiness beyond the variance predictable from Big Five personality traits. Mediation analysis suggested that effects of Big Five traits on happiness may be mediated to varying degrees by engagement in Positive/Proactive Behaviors and Physical Health Behaviors. Additional analyses examined possible moderation of the association between HIB and happiness by gender and Big Five traits; the strength of association between behavior and happiness did not differ between women and men, or across people with different scores on Big Five traits. This study provides additional evidence that naturally occurring behaviors are predictive of happiness in everyday life and confirms earlier findings about the degree to which behaviors mediate effects of Big Five traits on happiness.     

Factors related to helping behavior in preschool-age children

The present two studies were conducted to assess the prosocial behaviors (comforting and helping) of preschool children as a function of the race and gender of the subjects and peer confederates. Results indicated that black, preschool-age males demonstrated prosocial behaviors more often than did white males and females. These findings were discussed in terms of the confounding between race of child and father absence; that is, a disproportionate number of black children were living in fatherless homes. It was suggested that single parents may turn to their opposite-sex child for both emotional and physical support and thus the child learns comforting and helping behaviors early in life. Support for this suggestion was derived from the finding that the number of household chores assigned to a child was positively related to helping behavior. The present results also showed that comforting and helping behaviors were negatively related, suggesting that prosocial acts are not a function of a general personality trait but are situationally specific. Finally, it was noted that race and gender of the peer confederate were not factors in determining the prosocial responses of the subjects.     

Personality Traits That Predict Academic Citizenship Behavior

The association between personality and organizational citizenship behaviors is rarely examined in student populations. The present research tested the hypothesis that conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism predict unique variance in academic citizenship attitudes. In the first study, 270 college students completed an online questionnaire assessing their personality and academic citizenship attitudes. The results confirmed the hypothesis. In Study 2, we also tested the hypothesis that academic citizenship attitudes mediate the association between personality and citizenship behavior. Participants (n = 50) completed the online questionnaire. At a later session, they were asked to engage in an extra‐role helping behavior after completing the assigned task. The results showed that general conscientiousness was associated with citizenship behavior, but academic conscientiousness attitudes mediated this association.     

SAT Performance: Understanding the Contributions of Cognitive/Learning and Social/Personality Factors

This study identifies a number of sources of individual differences in SAT performance by examining the simultaneous contributions of factors from two otherwise disparate research areas, namely cognition/learning and social/personality. Preliminary analysis revealed that just the cognitive/learning measures accounted for 37.8, 41.4 and 21.9% of the variance in SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT performance, respectively while just the social/personality measures accounted for 21.4, 18.2 and 17.3% of the variance. When combined, cognitive/learning and social/personality factors accounted for even larger amounts of variance in performance; specifically 43.4, 44.6 and 28% for the SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT, respectively. Finally, the results revealed that three measures consistently predicted performance on the SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT; two measures were the learning/cognitive factors of working memory and integration of new text-based information with information from long-term memory and one measure was the social/personality factor, test anxiety.     

A General Factor of Personality in the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III, the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology, and the Personality Assessment Inventory

A General Factor of Personality (GFP) occupies the apex of the hierarchy in three prominent personality disorder inventories. On the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III, a GFP accounted for 41% of the variance in two second-order factors, 31% of the variance in five first-order factors, and 26% of the variance in all 24 scales. On the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology, a GFP accounted for 61% of the variance in six first-order factors and 36% of the variance in all 18 scales. In a cross-validation study of the Personality Assessment Inventory, a GFP accounted for 65% of the variance in two second-order factors, 47% of the variance in five first-order factors, and 27% of the variance in all 18 scales.     

The relationship between personality, approach to learning and academic performance

This study considers the relationship between students' approaches to learning, as measured by a short-form of Entwistle and Tait's (1995) Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI), the Big Five personality factors, as measured by Cattell's 16PFi, and the background variables of age, gender and prior educational achievement and academic performance. Subjects were 146 social science undergraduate students at a university in Scotland. Structural equation modelling identifies the Big Five personality factor scores account for between 22.7% and 43.6% of the variance across scores on the three approach to learning dimensions. Four of the Big Five personality factors and the three approach to learning dimensions were found to be poor predictors of academic performance. A linear regression analysis with academic performance as the dependent variable and age, prior educational attainment and conscientiousness as independent variables, accounted for 24.1% of the variance in performance. Our investigation suggests approach to learning is a subset of personality. However, we conclude it makes sense to measure these two groups of variables separately in educational settings.     

青少年创造性人格和创造性的关系：来自中美比较的证据

通过对中美400名13-15岁青少年问卷调查,比较了中美青少年创造性人格及其与创造性之间的关系.结果发现：（1）和单个创造性人格变量相比,创造性人格的内部因素、外部因素和自我因素和创造性之间的相关均达到中等程度,且均非常显著,中国青少年创造性人格三个因素能解释创造性变异的11％,美国青少年创造性人格三个因素能解释创造性变异的15％.（2）在创造性上,美国青少年在所有维度上的得分均显著高于中国青少年,但在创造性人格上,只有在自我因素上,中国青少年创造性人格得分高于美国青少年,其他因素不存在差异,这说明创造性人格不是造成中美青少年创造性差异的主要原因.     

时间领导对员工助人行为的影响:工作激情和主动型人格的作用

基于情感事件理论和人-境互动视角,应用bootstrap法根据260份有效问卷的数据执行路径分析,探讨时间领导对员工助人行为的影响机制。结果发现:时间领导正向预测助人行为;时间领导影响助人行为部分是通过和谐式激情与强迫式激情的并行多重中介作用来实现的,且和谐式激情的个别中介效应较大;由于主动型人格的调节作用,时间领导影响助人行为的直接效应和总效应在员工主动型人格较低时更强。     

Psychiatric patient- and informant-reported personality: predicting concurrent and future behavior

The authors investigated the criterion and incremental validity of personality reports from psychiatric patients and knowledgeable informants in predicting patient substance use, social and risky behaviors, and psychological distress. Patient and informant reports of patient personality and behavior were collected from an adult psychiatric sample (N = 94). Hierarchical regressions indicated that patient reports of personality accounted for significant variance in both concurrent (17%-42%) and future behavior assessed 1 year later (17%-40%). Informant reports contributed significantly to the prediction of several behaviors and most strongly to social behaviors. Behaviors were predicted equally well by self-reports and informant reports in prospective as in concurrent regressions. Thus, both patient and informant reports of personality contribute importantly to prediction of behavior, and predictive ability is stable across time.     

Investigating the Uniqueness and Usefulness of Proactive Personality in Organizational Research: A Meta-Analytic Review

Using meta-analysis (283 effect sizes from 122 studies), we extend prior qualitative and quantitative reviews of research on proactive personality in a number of meaningful ways. First, we examine the discriminant and incremental validity of proactive personality using meta-analytic regression analyses. Our results reveal that more than 50% of variance in proactive personality is unrelated to the Big Five personality traits collectively. Also, proactive personality accounts for unique variance in overall job performance, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors, even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits and general mental ability (for overall job performance and task performance). Moreover, we find no subgroup differences in proactive personality, highlighting its potential use in selection contexts. In conclusion, we discuss implications of our findings for research and practice.     

Helping behavior in children: Addressing the interaction of a person-situation model

A critical review of major trends and developments in the study of children's helping behavior is presented, with specific emphasis on demand characteristics of different situations (rescue, donation, assistance) and methodological difficulties inherent in such a study. In general, researchers have been able to isolate certain here-and-now situational influences which have led to mean increases in children's sharing behavior. As yet, however, relatively few studies have attempted to isolate personal characteristics of individual children as a means of examining baseline differences of individuals across different helping behaviors. As a start, this paper calls for a person-situation interactional approach to the study of children's helping behavior, examining such key factors as the child's family style, status in the peer group, and personality style as interactive with the characteristics of the particular helping situation.     

Personality, job level, job stressors, and their interaction as predictors of coping behavior

Hypotheses concerning the relationships among job stressors, job level, personality, and coping responses were investigated in a sample of 305 electrical contracting employees. Coping behaviors were measured with questionnaire items based on interviews conducted with a sample of the subjects. Neuroticism (N) and Extraversion (E) were the personality variables most strongly related to coping behavior. Overall, more coping variance was explained by personality than by job stressors; however, when the effects of job level and job stressors were combined, they explained more variance in complaining/quitting and seeking social support than did the personality variables. Both work situation and personality seem to be important variables in the choice of coping behaviors. There was no evidence of interactions among personality, stressors, and job level in explaining coping behavior.     

Is personality stable in adolescence? Disentangling time-invariant and time-varying factors of personality in a trait–state–occasion model

This study applied trait–state–occasion (TSO) modelling to investigate the extent to which inter-individual differences in personality were accounted for by time-invariant and time-varying factors during adolescence. The participants were 753 high school students, and only 661 students were followed for 4 years. The mean age in the first year was 15.23 years and 52.8% were females. The results showed that the full TSO model had the best representation of adolescent personality, and the means of the proportions of variance explained by trait factors for the Big Five ranged between 56% and 83%, suggesting that inter-individual differences in personality are mainly accounted for by stable trait variance over the course of adolescence. Furthermore, the five dimensions of personality differed not only in the amounts of trait variance but also in the stability of time-varying factors. These findings have significant implications for personality research.     

Emotional Experience and Its Relation to the Five-Factor Model in Estonian

ABSTRACT In this article we studied relations between self-rated emotional experience and the five-factor model of personality. Replicating previous findings we found that two dominant dimensions of emotional experience, Negative Affect and Positive Affect (that accounted for three to five times more total variance among Estonian emotion-related terms than any other factors) are selectively related to Neuroticism and Extraversion. Data supported the hierarchical taxonomy scheme proposed by Watson and Clark (1992) in which two broad higher order affective states were each composed of several correlated but still clearly distinguishable moods with their specific content. The content of specific emotions mapped systematically onto measures of personality: Affect scales explained 40% to 50% of the total variance of Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness, approximately 20% of the total variance of Agreeableness, and only 13% of Openness to Experience. Besides the replication of the hierarchical bipartite structure of emotion terms itself in a non-Indo-European language, our data demonstrated that the general pattern of associations between affect and personality domains is also generalizable across languages and cultures.     

Psychological Correlates of Anorexic and Bulimic Symptomatology

Few studies examining the relationship between eating disorders and personality have been theoretically derived; thus, findings have been equivocal. From a theoretical and empirical perspective (S. Orbach, 1986; R. L. Rogers & T. A. Petrie, 1997; G. J. Williams et al., 1994), this study investigated the connection between eating disorder symptomatology and several psychological correlates—obsessiveness, dependency, overcontrolled hostility, assertiveness, locus of control, and self‐esteem. Regression analyses indicated that obsessiveness and 2 factors of dependency accounted for 21% of the variance in a measure of anorexic attitudes and behaviors. One factor of dependency and obsessiveness accounted for 20% of the variance in a measure of bulimic symptomatology.     

Children's behavioral manifestations of the five-factor model of personality

The present study examined relations between ratings of children's personalities using the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality and behaviors exhibited by children during an interaction with their parents. Ninety-four children (M age = 10.87 years) and their parents participated in a videotaped interaction; children were coded on 64 different social behaviors using a revised version of the Riverside Behavioral Q-Sort. Mothers completed ratings of their children's personalities using the NEO-Five-Factor Personality Inventory (NEO-FFI). Results indicate an intuitive and predictable pattern of relations between children's personalities and their behaviors. Findings suggest that four of the five factors included in the FFM provide an appropriate framework for describing children's personalities. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for helping researchers understand children's personalities.     

Regulatory focus and work-related outcomes: A review and meta-analysis

Regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) has received growing attention in organizational psychology, necessitating a quantitative review that synthesizes its effects on important criteria. In addition, there is need for theoretical integration of regulatory focus theory with personality research. Theoretical integration is particularly relevant, since personality traits and dispositions are distal factors that are unlikely to have direct effects on work behaviors, yet they may have indirect effects via regulatory focus. The current meta-analysis introduces an integrative framework in which the effects of personality on work behaviors are best understood when considered in conjunction with more proximal motivational processes such as regulatory focus. Using a distal-proximal approach, we identify personality antecedents and work-related consequences of regulatory foci in a framework that considers both general and work-specific regulatory foci as proximal motivational processes. We present meta-analytic results for relations of regulatory focus with its antecedents (approach and avoid temperaments, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, self-esteem, and self-efficacy) and its consequences (work behaviors and attitudes). In addition to estimates of bivariate relationships, we support a meta-analytic path model in which distal personality traits relate to work behaviors via the mediating effects of general and work-specific regulatory focus. Results from tests of incremental and relative validity indicated that regulatory foci predict unique variance in work behaviors after controlling for established personality, motivation, and attitudinal predictors. Consistent with regulatory focus theory and our integrative theoretical framework, regulatory focus has meaningful relations with work outcomes and is not redundant with other individual difference variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Who helps and harms whom? Relational antecedents of interpersonal helping and harming in organizations

Antecedents of interpersonally directed forms of citizenship and counterproductive behaviors (i.e., interpersonal helping and harming, respectively) have been studied most often under the broad categories of individual differences and job attitudes. Although these behaviors often are exhibited within the confines of interpersonal relationships, the impact of relationship quality and context on such behaviors has been understudied. The present study uses a social networks framework to examine the relational antecedents of interpersonal helping and harming in a sample of 62 members of a college sorority house. Results indicate that relational variables--direct, third-party, and structural or positional characteristics of positive and negative affective networks, and the frequency of voluntary interaction--explain substantial incremental variance (beyond traditional predictors) in helping and harming. Moreover, helping and harming were themselves weakly positively interrelated. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

面孔可信度对助人行为的影响：依恋安全的调节作用

分别从特质依恋和状态依恋角度考察施助者的依恋安全在求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的调节作用。结果发现：(1)求助者面孔可信度影响助人行为, 面孔可信度高的求助者得到的助人行为显著多于面孔可信度低的求助者; (2)施助者的依恋安全调节求助者面孔可信度与助人行为之间的关系, 安全依恋能有效缓冲低面孔可信度带来助人行为下降的趋势。本研究结果表明依恋安全有助于提升社会安全感和促进亲社会行为, 因此应注重依恋安全的培养。