Effect of Big Five Personality Model on Employees’ Job Performance Considering the Mediating Role of Employees’ Behavior & Attitudes: A Study on the Banking Sector of Pakistan

Abstract

Intensive competition among the banks of Pakistan, have highlighted a need to pay close attention to the job performance of employees. After globalization and privatization phase, culture of the banks has been transformed into performance based culture. Now the major challenge for the banks’ management is to hire the employees who can perform at their full potential and to maximize the performance of existing employees. Unstructured interviews from recruiters of banks indicated that there are very few questions, asked about the personality traits of the candidate. But previous studies on the personality show that there are number of different employees’ behavior and attitudes that can be predicted through the personality analysis. So to highlight the importance of personality evaluation during recruitment process, this study has investigated the direct impact of personality traits on the job performance of employees. But the next question is that how to measure the personality of an employee accurately. So through the intensive review of literature, Big Five Personality model is discovered that is comprised of five personality traits that are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Experience. Two categories of job performance are considered in this study i.e. task and contextual performance. Further the role of innovative behavior and three components of organizational commitment that are affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment; is discussed in the relation of personality and performance. The importance of innovative behavior of workforce in highly competitive industries cannot be denied. Moreover it is found in the literature that committed workforce of an organization can take it on the peak of its success so realizing the importance of innovative behavior and organizational commitment, the role of these both variables are studied. To investigate and confirm the relations among the above discussed variables, questionnaires were distributed in approximately 700 banking sector employees, belong from the Public, Private, Islamic and Foreign bank branches of different regions of Pakistan. 384 completed and accurate questionnaires were got back from the ten different cities of Pakistan. Data analysis of these responses show that banking sector employees think that their performance is better in the assigned task as compare to the extra role duties. Moreover high innovative behavior is found in the employees and in the commitment constructs, employees are x found more affectively committed as compare to continuance and normative commitment. The relationship analysis show that personality traits can significantly predict both of the job performance constructs that are task and contextual performance.