Personality traits and job performance in local government organizations in China

Personality traits have repeatedly been found to be reliable predictors of job performance. In this study of Chinese local government organizations, the relationships between job performance and two personality traits, agreeableness and conscientiousness, were examined. Conscientiousness was as measured by Talents, a subscale taken from an indigenous scale, the Chinese Personality Scale (QZPS; Wang, Cui, & Zhou, 2005). As expected, talents were related to both task and contextual performance. However, agreeableness as measured by Kindness, from the same indigenous scale, was related negatively to task performance, and showed no relationship with contextual performance.