The relationship between the big five personality traits and job performance in business workers and employees’ perception

The paper reports the results of a study on the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and job performance carried out by surveying business workers and employees perception instead of passing through the computation of possibly faked (and biased) correlation coefficients between them. The sample is composed of 100 Italian workers and employees. They were surveyed with three methods: a semi-structured interview; the request to assess the relative importance of each Big Five for job performance (further investigation was carried out with 21 human resource managers and recruiters); the request to fill in the Big Five Questionnaire having in mind a best performer. Results show that, not completely consistent with literature, in workers and employees’ perception, to make the difference in job performance is mainly a behavioral trait (Conscientiousness or Extraversion). Emotional Stability is recognized to be the second most important Big Five. Agreeableness and Openness do not seem to make much difference in job performance.