Confounding Effects of Insufficient Effort Responding Across Survey Sources: The Case of Personality Predicting Performance

Abstract

Insufficient effort responding (IER) to surveys, which occurs when participants provide responses in a haphazard, careless, or random fashion, has been identified as a threat to data quality in survey research because it can inflate observed relationships between self-reported measures. Building on this discovery, we propose two mechanisms that lead to IER exerting an unexpected confounding effect between self-reported and informant-rated measures. First, IER can contaminate self-report measures when the means of attentive and inattentive responses differ. Second, IER may share variance with some informant-rated measures, particularly supervisor ratings of participants’ job performance. These two mechanisms operating in tandem would suggest that IER can act as a “third variable” that inflates observed relationships between self-reported predictor scores and informant-rated criteria. We tested this possibility using a multisource dataset ( N = 398) that included incumbent self-reports of five-factor model personality traits and supervisor-ratings of three job performance dimensions—task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We observed that the strength of the relationships between self-reported personality traits and supervisor-rated performance significantly decreased after IER was controlled: Across the five personality traits, the average reduction of magnitude from the zero-order to partial correlations was |.08| for task performance, |.07| for OCB, and |.14| for CWB. Because organizational practices are often driven by research linking incumbent-reported predictors to supervisor-rated criteria (e.g., validation of predictors used in various organizational contexts), our findings have important implications for research and practice.