Conscientiousness, neuroticism, and self -management strategies: A process model of personality and achievement outcomes

Research on the relationship between personality and achievement outcomes has revealed consistent links between the big five factors and performance. The big five (or five factor model) consists of conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and neuroticism. Recent meta-analyses have revealed that conscientiousness and neuroticism have the most consistent links to performance. In spite of these findings, we have little knowledge of how these personality traits influence outcomes. The purpose of this study was to test a process model that explains these relationships in terms of self-management strategies. Specifically, I used Manz and Neck's (1999) theory of self-management as a framework for this model. Their theory includes three categories of self-management strategies: the behavioral approach (goal-setting, self-cuing, self-observation, self-rewards, and self-punishment), natural rewards (focusing on the positive aspects of a task, modifying the task to make it enjoyable) and constructive thoughts (beliefs, self-talk, visualizing success). I examined how these self-management strategies mediate the influence between personality and performance, and personality and enjoyment of work.;Participants were undergraduate students at one of three large state universities. Self-report data were collected at four points during the semester and analyzed using structural equations modeling. The hypothesized model had a relatively poor fit to the data. The results indicated that conscientiousness predicted behavioral strategies as anticipated, but neuroticism was negatively related to only one type of self-management strategy---natural rewards (and was unrelated to both behavioral strategies and to constructive thoughts). Categories of self-management were related to one another as expected, with behavioral strategies predicting use of both natural rewards and constructive thoughts. However, only one of the hypothesized (positive) relationships between self-management and outcomes was supported, that between natural rewards and enjoyment. As predicted, enjoyment was positively related to performance. A revised model, reflecting additional theory about approach-avoidance motivation, demonstrated good fit to the data. In this revised model, neuroticism was removed from the model, the self-management categories were reorganized into "attention control" and "emotion management" factors, and the relationship between conscientiousness and achievement outcomes went though the self-management strategies. Implications of these findings and future research directions are proposed.