Personal Traits and "Success" in Schooling and Work

Abstract

The group peer rating technique is employed to develop highly reliable measures of 16 personality traits for 445 adult workers and 237 high school seniors. Several of these traits are found to have high predictive validity for pay differentials, supervisor's ratings, and school grades. Dimensions derived from multidimensional scaling of the traits explain between 19 and 43 percent of the variance in criterion variables, and the corresponding validity coeficients are extremely high compared to those given in Ghiselli's (1966) comprehensive review study. Moreover, the results are robust in multivariate regressions with a series of other variables.