Locus of control and performance appraisal

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Locus of Control and Performance AppraisalIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 10288 October 2016 ABSTRACT Locus of Control and Performance AppraisalThis work contributes to the literature demonstrating an important role for psychological traits in labor market decisions. We show that West German workers with an internal locus of control sort into jobs with performance appraisals. Appraisals provide workers who believe they control their environment a tool to demonstrate their value and achieve their goals. We confirm that workers who are risk tolerant also sort into jobs with performance appraisals but explain why the influence of the locus of control and risk tolerance should not be additive. We demonstrate this by estimating a routinely large and significantly negative interaction in our sorting equations. We also show that important patterns of sorting are revealed only when taking into account the interaction of locus of control and risk tolerance.JEL Classification: D03, J33, M52

Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

“…Previous literature on public versus private sector employment considers specific personality traits (beyond the Big Five), such as locus of control, trust and reciprocity (Brewer, 2003;Dohmen and Falk, 2010;Dur and Zoutenbier, 2014;Heywood et al, 2017). Therefore we perform a third robustness check where we include locus of control, trust, positive reciprocity and negative reciprocity.…”

“…While motives reflect what people want to do or to have in the future (McClelland, ; Roberts, ), personality traits reflect general tendencies of thinking, feeling and acting (Roberts, , p. 140). The Big Five personality traits as a common model of personality, which include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (Costa and McCrae, ), have been shown to be relevant for sector choice (Dohmen and Falk, ; Heywood et al ., ). We note that personality traits are not entirely distinct from motives, which becomes evident in the fact that the motive of laziness is – in inverted form – part of the personality trait conscientiousness in the SOEP measure (Gerlitz and Schupp, ; Hahn et al ., ).…”

Biased by Success and Failure: How Unemployment Shapes Stated Locus of Control

“…Additionally, as stated by Heckman (2011, p. 31), policy makers would gain a new 'avenue for intervention and policy' as the psychological impact of unemployment has been underestimated so far. Gathering specific insights on LOC's stability after job-loss, during unemployment 1 Additionally, studies have found an significant effect of LOC on entrepreneurial activity (Hansemark, 2003;Caliendo et al, 2014), occupational attainment and advancement (Andrisani, 1977;Cobb-Clark and Tan, 2011;Ahn, 2015;Schnitzlein and Stephani, 2016), maternity leave (Berger and Haywood, 2016), internal migration (Caliendo et al, 2015a), health behavior (Cobb-Clark et al, 2014), parental investment (Lekfuangfu et al, 2017), unemployment duration (Uhlendorff, 2004), selection into performance appraisal (Heywood et al, 2017), job satisfaction (Ng et al, 2006) and employment-related training (Caliendo et al, 2016). See Cobb-Clark (2015) for a comprehensive overview on LOC and labor market outcomes.…”

Performance Pay and Applicant Screening

“…Performance appraisals may not only be used in allocating financial rewards, but also in providing feedback to workers, in making job assignment and in determining training needs (Heywood et al . ). Thus, performance appraisal use does not perfectly overlap with the use of performance pay.…”

“…; Curme and Stefanec ; Dohmen and Falk ; Heywood et al . ). This research has used employee data to show that the self‐sorting into performance pay jobs can take place along multiple dimensions of the employees’ personal characteristics.…”