Personality, political skill, and job performance

Based on the socioanalytic perspective of performance prediction [Hogan, R. (1991). Personality and personality assessment. In M. D. Dunnette, L. Hough, (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (2nd ed., pp. 873–919). Chicago: Rand McNally; Hogan, R., & Shelton, D. (1998). A socioanalytic perspective on job performance. Human Performance, 11, 129–144.], the present study tests whether motives to get along and to get ahead produce greater performance when interactively combined with social effectiveness. Specifically, we investigated whether interactions of the Five-Factor Model constructs of agreeableness and conscientiousness with political skill predict job performance. Our results supported our hypothesis for the agreeableness-political skill interaction. Additionally, after correcting for the unreliability and restricted range of conscientiousness, we found that its interaction with political skill also significantly predicted job performance, although not precisely as hypothesized. Implications of the results and directions for future research are provided.