Full Text

This study compared the Big Five Personality facet scores of 138 CEOs compared with senior managers. The former were significantly less neurotic and had higher extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness scores on both domain and facet scales. The results were then investigated in 5 work functions: engineering, legal, accounting/finance, human resources, and marketing. Two traits showed very consistent results for all 5 functions: CEOs were less neurotic and more conscientious with Cohen’s d values between .30 and .85. Results were also examined at the phenotypic factor level to show a more detailed pattern. These results are consistent with the relatively few other studies on the personalities of CEOs. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Personality characteristics have been shown to play a significant role in work-related attitudes/behaviors (Barrick & Mount, 2005). Consequently, industrial/organizational (I/O) researchers have turned their attention toward identifying the essence of the relationship and the mechanisms that underlie it (Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001). Researchers have noted that personality affects two main behaviors that are vital for an organization: employee performance and withdrawal (Li, Barrick, Zimmerman, & Chiaburu, 2014). The personality traits that are less associated with employee withdrawal are conscientiousness, emotional stability (opposite pole of neuroticism), and agreeableness (Barrick & Mount, 2005; Zimmerman, 2008).

The five factor model (FFM) assesses five basic personality domains: extraversion, neuroticism or emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience (McCrae & Costa, 1990). The FFM is considered one of the most valid and reliable research models on personality and leadership (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002; McCrae & Costa, 1997) for two main reasons. First, the five domains are extremely stable over the life span of an adult (McCrae &...