Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the Big 5 personality factors(Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and seven factors of contextual performance found by Yoo and Kim(2002). By a exploratory factor analysis, Yoo and Kim(2002) derived seven factors of contextual performance: organizational dedication, helping others, job dedication, following organizational rules, inspiring work atmosphere, sharing and proposing information, and showing consideration. Questionnaires were administered to 450 employees across 16 organizations and 329 valid responses were used in the data analysis. In this study, the seven factors of contextual performance were measured by sixty-six items satisfying both conceptual and statistical conditions. The factor structure of contextual performance was confirmed by the LISREL. The result of the confirmatory factor analysis indicated the measurement model consisted of the seven factors was well fitted to the data. Correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationships between the five personality factors and two performance criteria(contextual performance and task performance). Results indicated that the Big 5 personality factors were found to have significant relationships with most of the seven contextual performance. Also, hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the influence of five personality factors on each of the seven contextual performance factors controlling for differences in employees` demographic variables(gender, age, tenure, job level, and job) which were entered into the regression equation first. The result showed that personality significantly explained the variance of contextual performance after controlling for the effect of demographic variables. Overall, Conscientiousness and Extraversion had the most significant impacts on the contextual performance. Also, results indicated that personality explained more variance of the contextual performance than that of the task performance as in the result of correlational analysis. Based on these findings, the implication of this study and the directions for further research were discussed.