A multirater perspective on personality and performance: An empirical examination of the trait-reputation-identity model.

Abstract

Organizational scientists have historically assessed personality via self-reports, but there is a growing recognition that personality ratings from observers offer superior prediction of job performance compared to targets' self-reports. Yet, the origin of these differences remains unclear: do observers show predictive validity advantages (a) because they have a clearer lens into how targets' thoughts, feelings, and desires translate to their behaviors (traits), (b) because they infer personality from how targets characteristically adapt their behaviors to situations (reputation), or (c) because they omit targets' unexpressed, internal aspects of personality (identity)? With a sample of 422 cadets at a highly selective military educational institute in South Korea, we applied (McAbee & Connelly, 2016) Trait-Reputation-Identity (TRI) Model to decompose consensus and discrepancy in multirater personality data. The variance associated with reputations (the unique personality insights held by observers) dominated the prediction for conscientiousness and agreeableness in predicting all criteria. Trait factors (reflecting the consensus between self- and observer-reports) were moderately related to ratings of job performance, citizenship, and grades for most theoretically aligned personality dimensions. Identity factors (targets' unique personality self-views) were generally unrelated to performance criteria, save for some modest positive relationships for conscientiousness (predicting work and academic performance) and agreeableness (predicting citizenship). These findings suggest that personality is an important determinant of success less by depicting "who employees are" (or "who they think they are") but more by describing "what employees do." We discuss the implications of these results for how multirater assessments can be built into organizational psychology research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).