Abstract: The relationship between employee personality and job performance has been a hot topic in disciplines involving personality or human resources; both models of, and relations between, job performance and personality have been established and applied widely in Western literature. Models established in Western private organizations and public administrations cannot be applied directly to Chinese government executives, however, because of the existence of significant Chinese-Western cultural differences. The job performance of Chinese local government executives is practically evaluated, for example, by their superiors, coworkers, and underlings in a subjective rather than objective manner, and previous research has indicated that different dimensions emerge when different workers—such as superiors, coworkers, and underlings—are evaluated. Meanwhile, it has been claimed through indigenous lexical research that the Chinese personality structure has seven dimensions, in contrast with the Big Five model of the Western personality. The current research looks to explore the possible relationship between job performance evaluation and personality dimension, while testing the hypothesis that the indigenous Chinese personality scale (QZPS) has a higher predictive validity than the Western Big Five personality scale (NEO PI-R) in predicting job performance.
A total of 172 Chinese local government executives—ranked as chief and vice-chief governors for both government and party committees at the county level—participated as subjects. They fulfilled both the QZPS and NEO PI-R, and their job performances were evaluated by both themselves and by others comprising three groups: (1) a superior group, consisting of leaders sent to evaluate county-level executives, in a group of three to five persons; (2) a co-worker group, of those who serve as co-worker executives at the same county level, in a group of 8~10 persons; and (3) an underling group, of those who serve as lower ranked executives, in a group of 10~20 persons. Group averages were aggregated as a job performance index, and self-rated job performance was based on a validity scale.
Internal consistency of job performance evaluation by three groups and the three subjects themselves were 0.69, 0.79, and 0.83; the range of internal consistency for QZPS and NEO PI-R were 0.81~0.87 and 0.58~0.71, respectively. The emotionality dimension of QZPS could negatively predict job performance as rated by others, and the variance in job performance was 6.3%~12.8% when the QZPS was applied as a predictor; openness correlated negatively with job performance as rated by others, and the variance in job performance was 2.2%~2.7% when the NEO PI-R was applied as a predictor.
For self-rated job performance, five out of seven dimensions of QZPS—namely, extroversion, behavior styles, emotionality, human relations, and ways of life—and nine out of 18 secondary factors were found to be significantly related to job performance, while the variance in job performance was 31.7%~34.1% and 40.3%~49.9% when dimensions or secondary factors of the QZPS were applied as predictors, respectively. Meanwhile, the variance in job performance was zero and 8.0%~16.0% when dimensions or facets of the NEO PI-R were applied as predictors, respectively.
Job performance evaluations of Chinese government executives were influenced significantly by the different roles of the evaluators. The personality dimensions of extroversion, behavior styles, emotionality, human relations, and ways of life could predict the job performance evaluation results from others and/or the subjects themselves. Only the openness dimension of the NEO PI-R entered the regression equation when predicting job performance as evaluated by others. The amount of variance in job performance as explained by personality dimensions of QZPS was significantly higher than that explained by the personality dimensions of NEO PI-R. The cultural differences vis-à-vis job performance and personality structures were also discussed

Key words: job performance, personality, QZPS, NEO PI-R, government executives