Personality and occupational health outcomes Flashcards
Outline key questions for selection and training (validity generalisation).
- Can you select the right person for a job?
- Do certain people do better in all jobs or some jobs?
- Are some people more trainable than others?
Outline key questions for equal opportunities and occupational health.
- How do you maintain fairness and equal opportunities?
- Why do some people cope with work pressure better than others?
What are the main work-related outcomes of personality?
Absenteeism - Low C and high E (mediated via absenteeism history) Accidents - Work - Low C & A, high N & O - Traffic - Low C & A, high N, O & E Entrepreneurial status (versus managers) - Higher on C and O, lower on N and A
Outline the effect of social desirability responding on the personality traits.
Small negative correlation between IQ and SD. Positive correlation between SD and N, smaller correlations with A and C.
Name the major evaluative issues regarding measurement of work performance.
Emotional issues: test anxiety
Structural issues: training transfer, temporal change and learning, and the criterion problem
Organisational justice
Equal opportunities
Describe the emotional issue of test anxiety regarding measurement of work performance.
- More anxious people may not do well on the day due to nerves
- Solutions:
- Assessment centres?
- Measure anxiety
Describe the structural issues of training transfer and temporal change and learning regarding measurement of work performance.
Training transfer
- Simulators: how well does training transfer back to the workplace?
Temporal change and learning
- Jobs change
What is the criterion problem of work performance measurement?
- How do you measure performance at work? Are exams a good index of ability at university?
- When outcome becomes a predictor - does a degree predict how well you’ll do in the world of work?
- Most psychometrics are on the predictor, not the outcome.
Outline the organisational justice problem of work performance measurement.
– Distributive, procedural, interpersonal
– Fairness and justice
– Should you have an interview, even if they have no predictive validity?
Outline the equal opportunities problem of work performance measurement.
Direct and indirect discrimination, constructive dismissal - you have to make sure the measures that you select on do not discriminate.
Outline the evaluation cycle.
Task analysis -> Develop materials (selection training, stress intervention -> Application -> Evaluation.
Give an example of task analysis in general practice being used for selection.
Patterson, Ferguson et al. (2000) used the Critical Interview Technique (CIT) and consultations to evaluate GPs’ performance and how it related to personality. Found strong evidence for a competency model comprising 11 categories (e.g. empathy and communication skills), implying that a greater account of personal attributes needs to be considered in recruitment and training, rather than focusing on academic and clinical competency alone. This implication was supported by Patterson, Ferguson et al. (2005), who developed a competency based selection system to recruit GP registrars, which they found had job performance predictive validity and that those recruited by the competency system performed better than those selected by traditional methods.
Outline the relationship between personality and illness.
Not everyone responds to illness in the same way, and some health outcomes can be explained by individual differences. According to Ferguson et al. (2013), personality affects the illness process through affecting bodily sensations, symptom reporting, associative processes, stress and coping, social cognitions, pathogenesis and communication, ultimately affecting mortality.
What are some of the main methods of studying symptom reporting?
Viral challenge studies, quasi-experiments, case control designs, experimental interventions, disease verification (signs and symptoms), covariates (age, time of year, nutrition, depression etc.), sub-clinical and clinical infection, and counts or reactivity to antigen.
Outline the symptom perception hypothesis (Costa & McCrae, 1985; Watson and Pennebaker, 1989).
Specifically with respect to neuroticism, subsumes three further hypotheses:
- Disability hypothesis
- Illness causes negative affect
- No evidence
- Illness causes negative affect
- Psychosomatic hypothesis
- Negative affect causes illness
- Might be related to immune system parameters
- Negative affect causes illness
- Perception hypothesis
- Negative affect differentially influences illness perception and symptom reporting
Outline the relationship between the Big 5 and health anxiety.
According to Ferguson (2000; 2003), emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness all show a negative association with health anxiety. However, big 5 and health anxiety both show co-morbidity with anxiety, depression and somatisation, so these could in fact be the cause of the association. But there’s evidence that ES, E, A and C show incremental validity over co-morbidity factors.
What did Feldman et al. (1999) do?
A viral challenge study (50% of participants given a virus and observed to study the relationship between personality and symptoms (both objective and subjective). Found that:
- High N = report more and more severe symptoms whether or not they’re actually ill
- High O = report more symptoms than low O only when symptoms are objectively present
- High C = 5x more likely to report being ill than low C when objective symptoms are present
In general, high scores on O, A and C are all related to reports of illness.
