Importance of Personality and Job-Specific Affect for Predicting Job Attitudes and Withdrawal Behavior

Abstract

This study explores the relative importance of trait-based personality constructs and a state-based job-specific affect construct for predicting job attitudes and withdrawal behaviors of incumbent customer service call center representatives (N = 150). Results based on three traditional indices of importance (i.e., squared correlation coefficients, squared standardized regression coefficients, and the product measure) yielded conclusions that were often inconsistent or ambiguous. In contrast, results based on two newer statistics (i.e., dominance and epsilon) were readily interpretable and virtually identical to one another. Overall, emotional stability and job-specific affect emerged as important predictors of various withdrawal criteria, relative to other personality variables.