One line of research that might be relevant is John Holland's Self-Directed Search theory.

Yes, it's mentioned in the list. @Paul

Yes it does. The Myers Briggs (MBTI) advocates for personality testing at teenage so that strengths and weaknesses that are personality based can be used to determine choice of career as well as personality traits /areas that one may need to develop to become a better fit for other careers.

The literature suggests that personality is a good predictor for vocational choice, although it is not a good predictor of performance. This is where motivation theory and competency behaviours come into play. Knowledge of one's own personality can assist in making a career choice in line with personal interests and preference, but it cannot predict performance. KSAs should be tested along with personality for a better, more holistic assessment and a better indicator of job satisfaction as well as performance.

e-mail response from Dr. Laurence Shatkin from careerlaboratory.blogspot.com " I'd like to share not a scholarly reference but an opinion: Just as important as the domain (e.g., interests) that is assessed is the mode of assessment. And I'm not referring to conventional measures of validity and reliability (although they certainly also matter). No, my point is that if the assessment is a black box whose workings the client does not understand, the results will lack buy-in from the client. The client will be less committed to acting on the results than if the client had gained insight (into personality or interests) through introspection.

Laurence Shatkin "@LaurenceShatkin

Lisi Mallinson " The literature suggests that personality is a good predictor for vocational choice, although it is not a good predictor of performance. " You mean it's a good predictor for job satisfaction but not performance?

Hashem Elassad I am not aware of a study with a direct correlation between personality and job satisfaction; my opinion is that it is not a good predictor. Too many other variables play a role in job satisfaction that has more to do with the conditions of the workplace than only job design. I can imagine that there is some link, although too many other variables play a role in job satisfaction, not personality alone. Personality assessment is not a good predictor of performance, this is a well-known fact. Personality assessment is actually more helpful in team dynamics and interpersonal dynamics or leadership styles. It helps people to be more aware of their own patterns and ways of doing things (habits), as well of those of others and the idea is to foster communication and working together well as a team or a group of people. Personality assessment is more useful in relational issues than what it is in predicting job performance or job satisfaction.

Dear Hashem Elassad ,

Personality has been given considerable attention in organizational psychology research, particularly in the last three decades (see Judge, Weiss, Kammeyer-Mueller, & Hulin, 2017, for a recent review). Some of the most widely studied personality models are: the big five personality traits (Goldberg, 1990), the positive/negative affectivity taxonomy (Brief, Butcher, & Robertson, 1995), and the core self-evaluations (Judge, Locke, & Durham, 1997). To date, numerous studies have demonstrated that personality plays a fundamental role in explaining both attitudes and behavior. Regarding job attitudes, personality has been found to significantly predict job satisfaction (e.g., Wu & Griffin, 2012), among several others. Furthermore, some other studies have demonstrated that personality can also explain performance-related outcomes (e.g., Judge & Bono, 2001), including, for instance, career success (Judge & Hurst, 2008). This being said, when studying job attitudes and behavior researchers should also take into account the influence of job characteristics, including the physical, social, and organizational context in which tasks are performed (e.g., Humphrey, Nahrgang, & Morgeson, 2007). Indeed, there is strong evidence that suggests that both personality and situational factors are relevant in explaining individuals’ attitudes and behavior in the workplace, making it necessary to use an interactionist approach. Please check the following references:

• Humphrey, S. E., Nahrgang, J. D., & Morgeson, F. P. (2007). Integrating motivational, social, and contextual work design features: a meta-analytic summary and theoretical extension of the work design literature. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(5), 1332.

• Judge, T. A., Locke, E. A., & Durham, C. C. (1997). The dispositional causes of job satisfaction: A core evaluations approach. Research in Organizational Behavior, 19(1), 151-188.

• Judge, T. A., & Bono, J. E. (2001). Relationship of core self-evaluations traits—self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability—with job satisfaction and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(1), 80-92.

• Judge, T. A., & Hurst, C. (2008). How the rich (and happy) get richer (and happier): relationship of core self-evaluations to trajectories in attaining work success. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(4), 849-863.

• Judge, T. A., Weiss, H. M., Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D., & Hulin, C. L. (2017). Job attitudes, job satisfaction, and job affect: A century of continuity and of change. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 356-374.

• Wu, C. H., & Griffin, M. A. (2012). Longitudinal relationships between core self-evaluations and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 331-342.

Best of luck with your research!

Follow up studies are scarse, however measures of interest and personality are correlated and the theory of Holland point the rôle of personality in vocational choice but using in practice interest measures.....My feeling base on the studies i have read or conduct is that interest is principally related to the vocational choice, and the stability in this choice, personnality principally with the adaptation to the working environment and relations with others workers and values pricipally with satisfactions in work...

Sincerely

F. Gendre

The question:

Is there strong evidence that choosing a career that fits one's personality or interests is of primary importance in regards to satisfaction or performance?

There are two concepts here: job satisfaction and job performance. Logically, at a superficial level, interests and motivation would be expected to relate to job satisfaction. i.e. it's what you want to do. And again, thinking superficially, if you show high levels of job satisfaction, then your performance is likely to reflect that state.

But, reality asserts itself. Just because you have an interest in something, or are motivated to do it, doesn't mean you'll be any good at it (i.e. you lack the 'smarts'). Furthermore, you may end up working as a drone employee in a large corporate, discovering that what you had in mind as the constituent work comprising your 'ideal vocation' is not what your employer requires from you! These points are similar to those made by Lisa Mallinson above.

For me, the empirical literature reflects this complexity .. personality, interests, and motivation are not accurate predictors of job performance. Both Schmitt (2014) and Schmidt, Oh, and Shaffer (2016) summarise this evidence.

But the way psychologists have gone about investigating the links is both crude and silly. Because what we might imagine as being our preferred vocation (via Holland's RIASEC or whatever) sometimes bears no relation to what's actually involved in the reality of the workplace, and the demands of employers/the market and perhaps even political interference (as evidenced in the academic world with all those stupid performance appraisals now inflicted on academics and institutions).

And remember the book by Brown, Lauder, and Ashton (2011) entitled: The Global Auction: The broken promises of education, jobs, and incomes. Immediately that research tells you that regardless of interest, motivation, and personality, the job you finally land in your ideal vocational area may be awful.

For me, to really research this issue, you need to drop the simple-minded correlational workups and create a more sensitive investigative design that takes into account the specifics of a job, and how job-roles with the same name can differ markedly in terms of expectations, autonomy, rewards, and especially pressure to comply to organizational rules (as per Hogan Chamorro-Premuzic, and Kaiser (2013)).

And ability is entwined with the non-cognitive aspects of our cognitive system. Our cognition (and metacognition) is not the product of discrete systems working independently from one-another. We function as an integrated, compensatory, complex system, where equifinality (and multifinality) are in operation (see Richters, 1997).

So, to try and really get to the heart of answering the initial question, you really need to adopt a more idiographic approach, almost ethnographic, and gradually build up (if at all possible) a more nuanced aggregate summary where approriate statistical analyses might be conducted to form more generalized claims of 'effect'. In a sense, a bit like Rivera's (2012) approach to understanding how elite professional service firms hire entrants, and the reasons why, and then proceeding with some form of encoding of relevant information.

But the sheer complexity of things may render any such generalizations as just silly - as happened with the idiotic utility analysis claims made by psychologists (Sturman, 2000).

Anyway, just my 2c.

Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Ashton, D.N. (2011). The Global Auction: The broken promises of education, jobs, and incomes. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0199926442. Free download at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227468309_The_Global_Auction_The_Broken_Promises_of_Education_Jobs_and_Incomes

Hogan, R., Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Kaiser, R.B. (2013). Employability and career success: Bridging the gap between theory and reality. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 6, 1, 3-16.

Richters, J.E. (1997). The Hubble hypothesis and the developmentalist's dilemma. Development and Psychopathology, 1, 2, 193-229.

Rivera, L.A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American Sociological Review, 77, 6, 999-1022.

Schmitt, N. (2014). Personality and cognitive ability as predictors of effective performance at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, , 45-65

Schmidt, F.L., Oh, I-S., & Shaffer, J.A. (2016). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 100 years of research findings. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2853669, 1-74.

Sturman, M.C. (2000). Implications of Utility Analysis adjustments for estimates of human resource intervention value. Journal of Management, 26, 2, 281-299.

As it happens, a major review article relevant to the question has just appeared today (in press):

a lead-article review in the journal Applied Psychology

Arieli, S., Sagiv, L., & Roccas, S. (2018). Values at work: The impact of personal values in organizations. Applied Psychology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/apps.12181 ), In Press, , 1-70. [paywall]

Abstract

This paper reviews and integrates past research on personal values in work organizations, seeking to portray the role personal values play in shaping the choices and behavior of individuals in work settings. We start by addressing the role of values in the occupational choice people make. We then review research on the relationships of personal values to a variety of behaviors at work. We continue with discussing the multiple paths through which managers’ values affect the organizations and its members. In the last section, we address the interplay between organizational levels, and discuss the congruency between personal and organizational values and its implications for organizations and their employees. Together, the research reviewed indicates how the broadness and stability of values make them an important predictor of behavior at various levels of the organization. We end by discussing directions for future research on values in organizations.

Actually a bit feeble for me - few effect sizes are reported, and compared to integral psychology spiral dynamics, the Schwartz stuff looks way too simplistic and lightweight. I can’t help feeling the drive to create a psychometric model has diminished the psychodynamics and deeper understanding of personal values.

But this bit on p. 38-39 seems to be a sign that separating values into work-based and ’personal-based is very wrong. A bit like the old chestnut that SHL used to spout about someone’s ‘work personality’ vs their ‘outside- of-work-personality’!

“p, 38-39

"Most studies on value-based socialization reviewed so far have investigated perceived fit or work-related values. Perceived fit may not indicate an actual value change, but rather a change in the perception of organizational values. Work related values are more contextual than basic values, and are hence more likely to be malleable. Indeed, some researchers have doubted the power of socialization process in altering personal values of employees (Dose, 1997; Lusk & Oliver, 1974). Studying basic values, Bardi and colleagues (2014) investigated police trainees in the UK at the beginning of their training and 9-monthes later. Training included classroom studies, field experience and mentoring by police organizational members. There was evidence of marginal value change, but it was not in the direction expected due to organizational socialization. Thus, even extensive, planned organizational socialization may yield only minimal change of basic values. Alternatively, a year may not be long enough to elicit value change. Professional training is a long-term process; it is possible that values socialization requires more time and may occur at later stages of the career. More research is needed to investigate the effects of organizational socialization along varying periods of time.”

Anyway, a decent review of publications in this area.

*The " big bang of body types" provides a parallel to what the question is looking for but in the realm of athletics not psychology.

Lots of research about Holland's theory (the SDS is an interests inventory based on his personality theory) on career choice.

There is less support that personality predicts career choice (eg. big-5, 16pf). Despite it's popularity in the careers world, the mbti doesn't have much substance.

Job performance is much more complex, many different factors contribute).

A poll related to the topic. Interesting to compare lay people's views and comments on the topic vis-a-vis people on RG. https://www.facebook.com/groups/pollonly/permalink/1435837203216348/

How important is the fit between someone's personality and their work?

ما أهمية تلائم شخصية الفرد مع طبيعة عمله؟

Answers (translation):

1- Very very important. From the priorities of choosing a career/job (73 people chose this)

2- Important but it's a secondary issue not a priority (9 people chose this)

One source of performance related aspects of personality come from a study using data from PGA and European Tour golfers. Their pros were looking for ways to address their clients' performance slumps.

It became clear from the data that four areas were instrumental: Focus, Fire (motivation), Faith(blelief in success), and conquering Fear. These are difficult to measure with self-report assessment. It is measured through a non-self-report

assessment that is strongly validated and measures a person's actual judgment and decision pattern.

If anyone wants to experience it or want to do research with it, let me know. If comes out of axiometrric methodology (measures of decision patterns), and in addition to having construct, concurrent, and criterion validity, it has a recent face validity level of 99.6 %. Moreover a major corporation using it produced a 6-year longitudinal study that predicts poor performance 80-95% of the time. I discovered it years ago and have found it so much more accurate than most other assessments, especially in predicting performance issues. I have used it ever since in the entire HR wheel: recruitment, development, team building, succession planning. It definitely affects performance.

e-mail response from Dr. Janet Scarborough Civitelli from vocationvillage.com "This is a fascinating question because it is often challenging to reconcile academic research studies with the day-to-day lived experience of career counseling clients. The short answer for me is that career satisfaction is predicted by some complex interplay between personality, interests, aptitudes, values, and specific variables of work environment such as the relationship with one's boss/colleagues/clients, the congruence with an organization's mission, the length of one's commute, etc. Perhaps someday there will be a powerful regression equation that can accurately predict the importance of each variable and then we can use it to guide vocational psychology practice."

RG message from Kleinjan Redelinghuys (PhD Industrial psychology) " I didn't really have time to sufficiently browse through the resources you provided (my apologies), but here is my non-expert opinion on the matter for what it’s worth.

From PE fit literature (although measured by a variety of factors including interests and personality), fit seems to have a fairly strongly relationship with job satisfaction (attitude), while having a weaker relationship with performance (behavior). This seems to be a trend where perceptions precede attitudes, intentions, and behaviors (e.g. look at theory of reasoned action / theory of planned behavior). However, I think what one should keep it mind is that different studies use different content dimensions per factor, different number of factors, different types of factors, and different methods of assessment (e.g. objective vs subjective / self-report vs peer-evaluated etc.) to assess fit, job satisfaction, and performance which makes clear comparisons and generalization quite hard. Based on what I’ve read in the past I would say that fit based on personality/interests will have a fair relationship with job satisfaction, and a relationship which may or may not be significant with performance. I think there should also be a fair possibility that fit will indirectly affect performance via job satisfaction.

That's my 2 cents worth. "

An article just out - which also brings a new perspective to matters:

Golle, J., Rose, N., Göllner, R., Spengler, M., Stoll, G., Hübner, N. Rieger, S., Trautwein, U., Lüdtke, O., Roberts, B.W., & Nagengast, B. (2018). School or Work? The choice may change your personality. Psychological Science (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797618806298), In Press, , 1-11.[paywall]

Abstract

Our personality traits may predispose us to choose particular career paths, but can choosing a particular career path also shape our personality traits? To find out, Golle and colleagues compared the Big Five traits (i.e., neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and extraversion) and vocational interests (i.e., artistic, social, enterprising, conventional, investigative, and realistic) of German students who had chosen an academic track with those of German students who had chosen a vocational track when they were 15 to 16 years old. Participants who had similar traits at the beginning of the study seemed to diverge after choosing a path: Students who selected the vocational track were more conscientious and had less investigative, social, and enterprising interests 6 years later compared with students who continued on the academic track. Having relatively well-defined work demands and more experienced colleagues might lead those who choose a vocational path to mature faster but could also diminish their interest in activities that fall outside the scope of their work. The different environmental pressures that come with staying in school versus entering a work path may influence personality development in early adulthood, the researchers conclude.

The analyses are sophisticated but a bit mad (as all actual scale-magnitude effects are effectively lost via standardization) - and some of the effect sizes are trivial in magnitude ... but some are not. Overall, the evidence is suggestive rather than definitive. Anyway, something to consider at least when thinking about career-choice, interests, and personality.

Paul, this is intriguing in that it tends to focus on content of thinking and it's effect on how subjects see themselves. What we find on the ground, dealing with actual people in actual jobs, is much diversity in terms of competence and differences of focus. This includes intuitive, pragmatic, and conceptual dimensions of focus. It would be interesting to see if there is an interaction between degree of thinking focus and impact of vocational vs. educational tracks. Are more conceptual types not as vulnerable to the impact of vocational track? Are more intuitive? Is it mostly high pragmatic thinking ypes that are the most vulnerable? Would intuitive thinkers who are also pragmatic drift toward craft-focused vocations?

You've prompted these questions. Thanks for keeping us thinking.

I found an interesting link, which might partly answer this question. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130709123923.htm

Do any of these studies on job satisfaction consider realities such as the changing nature of the workforce & economic downturn, ongoing restructuring, flexible labour market, outsourcing, short-term contracts and casualisation of the workforce and relationship with supervisers and colleagues? In one systematic review paper I co-wrote on anxiety and depression in male-dominated industries, I recall research referring to restructuring/retrenchment and working conditions (as well as relationships with supervisers and colleagues) as important factors. Job fit was just one factor in four key overarching themes.

Risk factors associated with anxiety and depression included:

I agree with Samantha Battmas view on considering realities. I dare to make some comments in this regard. It purely depends on my observations in my country.

1. Are there institutions which select employees based on their personality traits?

Job depends less on qualifications but more on political recommendations.

2. Is there any relation between education one acquires and personality of the learner?

Here irrespective of one's aspirations, personality the students are forced to study monotonous courses such as Engineering or Medicine (rare). From middle school level itself parents give preference to training the students for IIT's , IIIT's etc. In my Ph.D work i noticed that +2 level students (16 -19 yrs) have depressive symptomatology as they had to complete the course fast and earn money. Academic Expectation Stress from parents making them to have suicide ideation. Adolescents here could not sustain the stress and attempt suicide. You can check google for condition of students of India.

Aspirations for job does not suit or there is never (so far) considering child's personality before thinking about admitting himor her to a school or college.

Since getting job is scarce here, whatever job one gets, without thinking further for less money one joins it. There are many other factors at work place such as favoritism, caste-wise preferences of the supervisor etc play major role. For women it is worse. She must bear the harassment of the officials. So where is the place for job-satisfaction ?

For all the above mentioned agony of mine needs genuine research focus, which needs genuine Government participation (i wish it would come soon).

Dr. Deepthi Balla