Moderation effects of perceived organisational support on curvilinear relationship between neuroticism and job performance

- Neuroticism does not necessarily relate negatively to performance.
- Contrary to conventional belief, neuroticism up to a certain level can be beneficial for performance.
- The extent to which neuroticism can be beneficial to performance is determined by perceived organisational support.

The relationship between neuroticism and job performance is often assumed to be negative and linear. The current research challenges this assumption conceptually and empirically and tests a curvilinear relation between neuroticism and job performance. Further, the present work also hypothesizes that perceived organisational support (POS) moderates the curvilinear neuroticism-job performance relationships such that the inflection points after which the relationship disappears will be lower for low POS than that for high POS. By using samples from two time periods (T1 = 505; T2 = 481) of sales employees from Indian Life Insurance Industry, the present study found a curvilinear relationship between neuroticism and job performance and the support for moderation effects of perceived organisational support on this relationship. Implications of the study to theory and practice are discussed.