| Personality has been one of the most rapidly advancing research fields in personnel psychology since the early 1990's. However, despite the significant role of personality in the field of personnel selection, our current knowledge is limited to Euro-American contexts. Because of absence of systematic, cross-cultural research on this matter, we do not yet know if the same conclusions hold true in East Asian contexts. In this dissertation, I attempt to address this gap by examining the operational validity of self-report based measures of the FFM traits absolutely and relative to general mental ability (GMA) in East Asian contexts spanning five countries: South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore. As with any given trait, there was noticeable apparent variation in validity across the East Asian countries, but most of the variation was found to be artifactual due to second-order sampling error. The overall results show that two FFM traits, namely Extraversion and Conscientiousness, were found to be most valid in East Asia with mean operational validities of .23 and .18, respectively, whereas Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability were the two most valid FFM traits in Euro-America. The importance of Extraversion for job performance seems to reflect the more critical role of the interpersonal relationship in career success in East Asia than in Euro-America. GMA was found to have stronger validity in South Korea than in Japan. Taken together, South Korea, among the East Asian countries considered, was found to have the most similar profile of results with that of North America (or Europe). I also discuss significant contributions and limitations, along with directions for future research and ways to increase the validity of personality in terms of both the predictor and criterion sides. In conclusion, the current study contributes to research in East Asia linking personality with performance at work in that it provides both global and local researchers and practitioners with timely and comprehensive meta-analytic solutions pertaining to the cross-cultural (particularly, East-Asian) applications of the FFM traits and GMA. |
