The indirect relationship between neuroticism and job performance in italian trade workers: A cross-sectional study

Since Neuroticism is the only negative personality trait out of the so-called Big Five (the other four are Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Openness), researchers often reverse it into the complementary one of Emotional Stability (Jeronimus, Riese, Sanderman, and Ormel, 2014). Emotional Stability is considered to be one of the two Big Five (the other one is Conscientiousness; Le et al., 2011), if not the only one (Tett, Jackson, and Rothstein, 1991), to be a valid predictor of job performance regardless of gender and occupational group (Barrick, Mount and Judge, 2001; Shaffer and Postlethwaite, 2013). In addition, Emotional Stability is the only one Big Five that improves over the length of service (Williams et al., 2006). On the other hand, the strength and type of correlations between the Big Five and job performance also depend on the specific job considered (Judge, Rodell, Klinger, Simon, and Crawford, 2013). For example, Extraversion has been found to be particularly related to job performance in sales (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Mount, Barrick, and Stewart, 1998), and a study carried out by Warr, Bartram and Martin (2005) on the relationship between personality and sales performance finds that high job performance is related to low Agreeableness. In the specific case of the study here presented, the sample was composed of 220 trade agents (16 females). A cross-sectional survey design was used. The personality traits were measured by a new Italian personality test named FLORA, which is based on the Big Five and covers 24 dimensions (Sartori, Ceschi, Costantini, and Scalco, 2015). Job performance was expressed in terms of sales figures. Results show statistically significant positive correlations of job performance to Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Openness, a statistically significant negative correlation to Agreeableness and an indirect positive relationship between Emotional Stability (Neuroticism) and job performance passing through the length of service. Results are discussed in the light of literature.