Having problems with your employees acting rudely? Wandering off with office supplies? Charging your organization for their personal activities? Dragging out work in order to get overtime pay?
Every organization seems to have its share of counter-productivity and friction. Not just for-profit jobs, but churches, volunteer organizations, vigilante groups, any organization that relies on the cooperation of its members. But what’s the solution?1
One way to overcome this problem is to have a perfect, politics-free organizational culture—to ensure that everyone gets along smoothly, good performance is rewarded and poor behavior consistently corrected. This is definitely worth trying for!
But in reality, few organizations are perfect. And while your honest employees will tend to frown and go about their duties in spite of the daily problems they encounter in their place of work, others will soon figure out what they can get away with:2
What you’re looking at is a graph from a 2014 study on employee behavior; Honesty-Humility was measured the usual way, by the HEXACO personality inventory. Their findings were overall that, as the organizational culture worsens, dishonest employees use more impression management strategies to look good rather than accomplish anything, and will take actions to get back at the organization and everyone in it.
This is only one study, of course. But similar findings are seen when employees are insecure about their position: Honest employees may treat every day as an opportunity to get the job done, but others will treat every day as their last.3
The obvious takeaway is that if you don’t manage to address every grievance or concern your staff may have, esprit de corps will gradually decline as free-riding becomes the norm—starting with the less honest ones, who’ll crack first.
I don’t have solid data to rely on for predicting what comes next. But personal experience says that if things get bad enough, you may find that the honest tail of your workforce gets tired of being exploited for wanting to work hard and take their job seriously. They aren’t going to rip you off. They’re going to leave, resulting in the less effective employees dominating your organization, and good luck climbing out of that pit.
Isn’t Conscientiousness the Trait We’re All Looking For?
General recommendations from the psychological community say you should be really trying to hire Conscientious4 employees, or maybe Agreeable ones.5 But given the difficulty of maintaining a pristine organization free of office politics and job insecurity, it should be no surprise that Honesty-Humility is just a strong predictor of good behavior at work in general.
What may be a surprise to those people who downplay or ignore Honesty-Humility is that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness aren’t the personality traits you really want to be paying attention to. When it comes to predicting deviance at the workplace, meta-analytical results show Honesty-Humility is king:
Honesty-Humility shows the strongest relation with workplace deviance, followed by Conscientiousness (Big Five and HEXACO) and Agreeableness (Big Five and HEXACO)… We also found that the HEXACO domains (31.97%) explain more variance in workplace deviance than the Big Five domains (19.05%).6
This is part of an overall trend for the HEXACO to outperform the Big Five,7 for the very simple reason that six (mostly) orthogonal personality dimensions will give you more information about people than five.
But it’s also part of a trend for Conscientiousness to be a better predictor of task performance, while Honesty-Humility is a better predictor of exploitation. Another meta-analysis from 2020 looked at a wide range of behaviors, and grouped them into broad classes, which they called Exploitation, Insecurity, Sociality, Obstruction, Duty, and Exploration. Exploitation consisted of a broad range of things like criminality, cheating, Narcissism, and short-term mating vs. altruism, cooperation, and pro-environmental behavior; Duty represented a narrower set of outcomes like job performance, academic grades, and self-control. As you might expect, Honesty-Humility better explains outcomes related to Exploitation than Duty (𝜌̂ = -.48 vs .18) while the situation is reversed with Conscientiousness (𝜌̂ = -.24 vs .41).8
In case you’re curious, there’s far, far more data at the meta-analysis itself; but the main results look like this:
Honesty-Humility vs. Exploitation: 𝜌̂ = -.48
Emotionality vs. Insecurity: 𝜌̂ = .27
Extraversion vs. Sociality: 𝜌̂ = .53
Agreeableness vs. Obstruction: 𝜌̂ = .33
Conscientiousness vs. Duty: 𝜌̂ = .41
Openness vs. Exploration: 𝜌̂ = .389
That last relationship is really why I discuss this kind of thing. It’s not that my Honesty is particularly high—it’s that my Openness is extremely high, and I’m just really curious about all this stuff. People who continue to try to squeeze every last drop of predictive power out of the Big Five are in some ways wasting everybody’s time; failing to include the H-factor in results in a large loss of information, about equal to the amount that would be lost by neglecting one of the traits from the Big Five.10
The only reason psychological studies continue to neglect Honesty-Humility is because, well, neglecting Honesty-Humility is just what they’ve always done,11 and because some public intellectuals keep acting like, five personality factors are, wow, all there is to know. And this is wrong; we’ve even known for more than a decade that there is a very clear seventh factor, and I’ll be pretty excited when psychologists regularly start including measures of schizotypy/disintegration/psychoticism in their studies.121314 I’m the sort of guy who’s impatient to explore the vast space of possibility out there, the way physicists plumbed the secrets of other glaxies, and the past, and the distant future. But baby steps, people! Eventually the rest of us will get there, too.
Conclusion
Try not to hire dishonest people, or they’ll rip you off and wreck your organization.
Try not to keep acting like there are only five personality factors, or I will poke fun at you.
No for once it isn’t apple pie
Wiltshire, J., Bourdage, J. S., & Lee, K. (2014). Honesty-humility and perceptions of organizational politics in predicting workplace outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology, 29, 235-251.
Chirumbolo, A. (2015). The impact of job insecurity on counterproductive work behaviors: The moderating role of honesty–humility personality trait. The Journal of psychology, 149(6), 554-569.
Dudley, N. M., Orvis, K. A., Lebiecki, J. E., & Cortina, J. M. (2006). A meta-analytic investigation of conscientiousness in the prediction of job performance: examining the intercorrelations and the incremental validity of narrow traits. Journal of applied psychology, 91(1), 40.
Witt, L. A., Burke, L. A., Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (2002). The interactive effects of conscientiousness and agreeableness on job performance. Journal of applied psychology, 87(1), 164.
Pletzer, J. L., Bentvelzen, M., Oostrom, J. K., & De Vries, R. E. (2019). A meta-analysis of the relations between personality and workplace deviance: Big Five versus HEXACO. Journal of vocational behavior, 112, 369-383.
Thielmann, I., Moshagen, M., Hilbig, B., & Zettler, I. (2022). On the comparability of basic personality models: Meta-analytic correspondence, scope, and orthogonality of the Big Five and HEXACO dimensions. European Journal of Personality, 36(6), 870-900.
Zettler, I., Thielmann, I., Hilbig, B. E., & Moshagen, M. (2020). The nomological net of the HEXACO model of personality: A large-scale meta-analytic investigation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 723-760.
Ibid.
Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2018). How well do Big Five measures capture HEXACO scale variance?. Journal of personality assessment.
Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2020). Objections to the HEXACO model of personality structure—And why those objections fail. European Journal of Personality, 34(4), 492-510.
Knežević, G., Lazarević, L. B., Bosnjak, M., & Keller, J. (2022). Proneness to psychotic‐like experiences as a basic personality trait complementing the HEXACO model—A preregistered cross‐national study. Personality and Mental Health, 16(3), 244-262.
Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2012). Oddity, Schizotypy/dissociation, and personality. Journal of Personality, 80(1), 113-134.
Nedeljković, B., & Topalović, N. (2023). Disintegration predicts problem alcohol and drug use, quality of life, and experience in close relationships over the Big Five and HEXACO personality traits. Primenjena psihologija, 16(2), 269-294.
TTS gang$😈
(this is an off-topic-ish comment) given the most conscientious people I've worked with are Conservationists (i.e. ecology 'woke' from the narcissistic right) I'd say the linkage with conservative-ness index ---like a religion e.g. Christianity may be breaking down ( exampled by, in the USA and thus the web, under alpha-incel identity politics... the hoped for linkage is Christian nationalism but you do not always get what you asked for... https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/1/10/24024341/calendargate-conservative-civil-war
"Mennonite style" communities will resist this too for longer, obviously but, the conscientious found elsewhere may not be linked by any easily indetifiable groups at the moment (the linkage with religious groupings may be a survivorship issue/bias). (I've just read https://www.sofiasamatar.com/books/the-white-mosque/ )
We have Plymouth Brethren in Tasmania... (and we already have a reputation for inbreeding)