Personality Trait

Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five personality traits (McShane, Olekalns & Travaglione, 2010). The status of conscientiousness being the most suitable predictor of job performance for most jobs was granted by (Mount and Barrick, 1993). However, (Beaty, Cleveland and Murphy, 2001) claims that organisations should think beyond the personnel selection and consider situational influences when evaluating the role of personality in predicting the job performance. Nevertheless Hurtz and Donovan (2000) argues that stating conscientiousness as a valid predictor of job performance portrays an inaccurate representation of true validity of Big Five in an absolute sense. In this paper the role of personality and job performance is being investigated.

Individuals high in conscientiousness are honest, dependable, responsible, self disciplined and achievement oriented (Mount and Barrick 1993; Organ and Konovsky 1996). At Central College on many occasion our Manager told us that the tutors are suppose to help the students in face to face interaction, create an environment to get them engaged, and follow rules and adhere to respect organisational properties and resources meaning tutors are suppose to be highly conscientious people. Research on the relationship between conscientiousness and job performance suggests that conscientiousness people captures the personal qualities of dependability, achievement striving, competence, and perseverance (Organ and Konovsky 1996, p. 255). Most of our students were second time learners, coming from broken families, abused, had criminal record thus the initial task to get them engaged was not easy but through determination we were able to get them to complete their course. A “will do” attitude was required from us. (Hurtz and Donovan 2000, p. 871) stated that because of conscientiousness associations with achievement measurement and its connection with power or ability to decide, it has also been called will to achieve. Tutors at...