FFM measures and job performance in Chinese organizations

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between the five‐factor model (FFM) of personality and job performance in Chinese organizations via meta‐analysis. It also aims to look at the moderating effects of job types and rating sources, and give some suggestions for future studies and practical application.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses meta‐analysis as its main approach. According to the selecting criteria, nine papers from Chinese Academic Database and Chinese Excellent Graduate Dissertation Database are selected as samples for analysis. Basic statistics, homogeneity test and analysis of variance are used to analyze the data.

Findings

All the five factors of FFM are significantly related to the overall job performance in Chinese organizational context. Conscientiousness has the highest correlation coefficient while neuroticism has a negative relation with the performance. Neuroticism is more related with contextual performance than with task performance. Overall, FFM is related to self‐rating performance more than that with others‐rating performance. Correlations between extraversion and job performances are higher for the teacher group than for the other job groups.

Research limitations/implications

The limitation of the paper is that the sample size is not big enough. The implications of findings are discussed.

Practical implications

The paper shows that under Chinese situation, FFM has significant relation with job performance which implies that FFM can be applied to some activities of human resource management to some extent.

Originality/value

The paper summarizes almost all the empirical studies on the relation between FFM and job performance in China since 1995. This is the first time a meta‐analysis of FFM has been done by using papers published in China. It contributes to the existing literature by extending the research scope and taking Chinese local literature into consideration.

Citation

Tang, N. and Wang, G. (2010), "FFM measures and job performance in Chinese organizations", Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 49-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/20408001011051205