ABSTRACT
The study of personality in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology has been active since the early 1990s. In the 20 years following Barrick and Mount (1991) and Tett, Jackson, and Rothstein (1991), researchers have sought to understand how and why personality is related to a variety of individual outcomes, such as job performance and contextual performance (e.g., Hurtz & Donovan, 2000), job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction; Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), leadership (e.g., Bono & Judge, 2004), and subjective well-being (Hayes & Joseph, 2003). Although there remains some debate over the usefulness of personality traits in some contexts (e.g., personnel selection; Tett & Christiansen, 2007), in general the published record shows that I/O psychologists have embraced personality, especially in terms of traits, as a set of individual difference variables important for understanding workplace behavior.
