Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being responsible, careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They tend to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. Conscientiousness manifests in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, systematic, careful, thorough, and deliberate.
Conscientiousness is one of the five traits of both the Five Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality and is an aspect of what has traditionally been referred to as having character. Conscientious individuals are generally hard-working and reliable. When taken to an extreme, they may also be "workaholics", perfectionists, and compulsive in their behavior. People who score low on conscientiousness tend to be laid back, less goal-oriented, and less driven by success, if they also score high on Big Five Agreeableness; otherwise, they are also more likely to engage in anti-social behavior and commit blue-collared crimes and crimes of passion.
Personality models
Conscientiousness is one of the five major dimensions in the Big Five model of personality, which consists of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Two of many personality tests that assess these traits are Costa and McCrae's NEO PI-R and Goldberg's NEO-IPIP. According to these models, conscientiousness is a continuous dimension of personality, rather than a categorical "type" of person.In the NEO framework, Conscientiousness has six facets: Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement Striving, Self-Discipline, and Deliberation. Other models suggest a smaller set of two "aspects": orderliness and industriousness form, with orderliness associated with the desire to keep things organized and tidy and industriousness being more associated with productivity and work ethic.
Other Big Five personality traits such as low extraversion, high agreeableness, low openness, and low neuroticism are linked to high conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness also appears in other models of personality, such as Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory, in which it is related to both self-directedness and persistence. The traits of rule consciousness and perfectionism are included in Cattell's 16 PF model. It is negatively associated with impulsive sensation-seeking in Zuckerman's alternative five model.
Traits associated with conscientiousness are frequently assessed by self-report integrity tests given by various corporations to prospective employees.
Origin
Terms such as "hard-working", "reliable", and "persevering" describe desirable aspects of character. Because conscientiousness was once believed to be a moral evaluation, it was overlooked as a psychological attribute. The reality of individual differences in conscientiousness has now been clearly established by studies of cross-observer agreement. Peer and expert ratings confirm the self-reports that people make about their degrees of conscientiousness. Furthermore, both self-reports and observer ratings of conscientiousness predict real-life outcomes such as academic success.During most of the 20th century, psychologists believed that personality traits could be divided into two categories: temperament and character. Temperament traits were thought to be biologically based, whereas character traits were thought to be learned either during childhood or throughout life. With the advent of the FFM, behavior geneticists began systematic studies of the full range of personality traits, and it soon became clear that all five factors are substantially heritable. Identical twins showed very similar personality traits even when they had been separated at birth and raised apart, and this was true for both character traits and temperament traits. Parents and communities influence the ways in which conscientiousness is expressed, but they apparently do not influence its level.
Measurement
A person's level of conscientiousness is generally assessed using self-report measures, although peer-reports and third-party observation can also be used. Self-report measures are either lexical or based on statements. Deciding which measure of either type to use in research is determined by an assessment of psychometric properties and the time and space constraints of the study being undertaken.Lexical
use adjectives that reflect conscientiousness traits, such as "efficient" and "systematic", and are very space- and time-efficient for research purposes. Goldberg developed a 20-word measure as part of his 100-word Big Five markers. Saucier developed a briefer 8-word measure as part of his 40-word mini-markers. Thompson revised these measures to develop the International English Mini-Markers which has superior validity and reliability in populations both within and outside North America. Internal consistency reliability of the International English Mini-Markers for the Conscientiousness measure for native English-speakers is reported as.90, that for non-native English-speakers is.86.Statement
Statement measures tend to comprise more words than lexical measures, so consume more research instrument space and more respondent time to complete. Respondents are asked the extent to which they, for example, often forget to put things back in their proper place, or are careful to avoid making mistakes. Some statement-based measures of conscientiousness have similarly acceptable psychometric properties in North American populations to lexical measures, but their generally emic development makes them less suited to use in other populations. For instance, statements in colloquial North American English like Often forget to put things back in their proper place or Am careful to avoid making mistakes can be hard for non-native English-speakers to understand, suggesting internationally validated measures might be more appropriate for research conducted with non-North Americans.Behavior
Development
Currently, little is known about conscientiousness in young children because the self-report inventories typically used to assess it are not appropriate for that age group. There are likely individual differences in this factor at an early age. It is known, for example, that some children have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which is characterized in part by problems with concentration, organization, and persistence. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies suggest that conscientiousness is relatively low among adolescents but increases between 18 and 30 years of age. Conscientiousness generally increases with age from 21 to 60, though the rate of increase is slow.Individual differences are strongly preserved, meaning that a careful, neat, and scrupulous 30-year-old is likely to become a careful, neat, and scrupulous 80-year-old.
Daily life
People who score high on the trait of conscientiousness tend to be more organized and less cluttered in their homes and offices. For example, their books tend to be neatly shelved in alphabetical order, or categorized by topic, rather than scattered around the room. Their clothes tend to be folded and arranged in drawers or closets instead of lying on the floor. The presence of planners and to-do lists are also signs of conscientiousness. Their homes tend to have better lighting than the homes of people who score low on this trait.Academic and workplace performance
Conscientiousness correlates with successful academic performance in students and workplace performance among managers and workers. Low levels of conscientiousness are strongly associated with procrastination. Conscientiousness has a moderate to large positive correlation with performance in the workplace, and in contrast, after general mental ability is taken into account, the other four Big Five personality traits do not aid in predicting career success.Conscientious employees are generally more reliable, more motivated, and harder working. They have lower rates of absenteeism and counterproductive work behaviors such as stealing and fighting with other employees. Furthermore, conscientiousness is the personality trait that correlates the most with performance across all categories of jobs.
Agreeableness and emotional stability may also be important, particularly in jobs that involve a significant amount of social interaction.
Of all manager/leader types, top executives show the lowest level of rule-following, a conscientious trait. Conscientiousness is not always positively related to job performance; sometimes the opposite is true. Being too conscientious could lead to taking too much time in making urgent decisions and to being too attached to the rules and lacking innovation.
Subjective well-being
A 2008 meta-analysis found that conscientiousness has a positive relationship with subjective well-being, particularly satisfaction with life. Highly conscientious people tend to be happier with their lives than those who score low on this trait.Although conscientiousness is generally seen as a positive trait to possess, research suggests that in some situations it may be harmful for well-being. In a prospective study of 9,570 people over four years, highly conscientious people suffered more than twice as much if they became unemployed. The authors suggested this may be due to conscientious people making different attributions about why they became unemployed, or through experiencing stronger reactions following failure. This finding is consistent with perspectives which see no trait as inherently positive or negative, but rather the consequences of the trait being dependent on the situation and concomitant goals and motivations.