The importance of being humble: A meta-analysis and incremental validity analysis of the relationship between honesty-humility and job performance.

Abstract

The HEXACO model presents a conceptualization of personality that includes the trait honesty-humility (H-H) in addition to 5 other personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotionality, extraversion, openness) that closely approximate the ubiquitous five-factor model (FFM) of personality. A substantial literature has accumulated supporting the structure of the HEXACO model and the construct validity of the H-H trait in particular. A newer development is the appearance of H-H in the applied psychology literature. This begs the question of whether H-H exhibits significant criterion-related validity with respect to job performance and whether H-H accounts for incremental validity over other established individual differences predictors of job performance. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship between H-H and 3 major dimensions of job performance (counterproductive work behavior [CWB], organizational citizenship behavior [OCB], and task performance) and compare the incremental validity of H-H with other established individual differences predictors (general mental ability, the FFM, and integrity tests). Our results indicate that H-H correlates −.44 with CWB, .13 with OCB, and .15 with task performance (each correlation corrected for unreliability in both the independent and dependent variables). Further, H-H demonstrated incremental validity over the other individual differences predictors in the case of CWB but not OCB and task performance.

Open Peer Commentary and Author's Response

“…All studies to date also indicate that the construct assessed by integrity tests is a compound of conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability, in that order (see Ones & Viswesvaran, 2001 for summaries). Honesty-Humility correlates .55 with integrity (see meta-analytic results presented in Table 2 of Lee, Berry, Gonzalez-Mule, 2019). This is the same degree of correlation found between alternate measures of integrity .…”

“…Big Five Agreeableness, in turn, yielded comparably weak relations with prosocial behavior in all situations. Moreover, there is now consistent, meta-analytic evidence that Honesty-Humility outperforms Big Five Agreeableness in accounting for diverse (un)ethical behaviors such as dishonesty (Heck, Thielmann, Moshagen, & Hilbig, 2018) and counterproductive work behavior (Lee, Berry, & Gonzalez-Mule, 2019;Pletzer, Bentvelzen, Oostrom, & De Vries, 2019).…”

Leader honesty/humility and subordinate organizational citizenship behavior: a case of too-much-of-a-good-thing?

“…Organ (1988) identified three dimensions of OCBI, namely, altruism, conscience, and courtesy. Marcus et al (2007) pointed out that honesty/humility predicts a strong moral conscience that induces prosocial and ethical behaviors toward others (Oh et al, 2014) and prompts a moral obligation to help (altruism) and respect others even when one can be exploited by them (courtesy) (Lee et al, 2019). Ashton and Lee (2007) suggested that the honesty/humility construct evokes reciprocal altruism as a motive for prosocial behavior of those observing the trait in a significant other.…”

The Nomological Net of the HEXACO Model of Personality: A Large-Scale Meta-Analytic Investigation

“…The HEXACO model encompasses six trait dimensions: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness versus anger (in the following termed agreeableness ), conscientiousness, and openness to experience (in the following termed openness ). Research relying on the HEXACO model as a framework of individual differences has heavily increased in recent years, not only in personality psychology (e.g., Ruchensky, Donnellan, & Edens, 2018) but also across (psychological) disciplines such as behavioral economics (e.g., Thielmann, Spadaro, & Balliet, 2020; Zhao & Smillie, 2015), clinical psychology (e.g., Gaughan, Miller, & Lynam, 2012), educational psychology (e.g., Allgaier, Zettler, Wagner, Püttmann, & Trautwein, 2015; McAbee, Casillas, Way, & Guo, 2019), political psychology (e.g., Lee, Ashton, Griep, & Edmonds, 2018), and work and organizational psychology (e.g., Lee, Berry, & Gonzalez-Mulé, 2019; Pletzer, Bentvelzen, Oostrom, & de Vries, 2019).…”