HEXACO personality model receives more support

Although the Big 5 model of personality (generally broken into Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) has received wide empirical support, not everyone agrees it's the final word on a taxonomy for normal adult personality.

One camp believes (with reason) that honesty and humility play a consistent role in differentiating people and predicting behavior, and should be added to the Big 5 and the most recent issue of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology contains a research report that lends credence to this view.

In the article, the authors describe three results of their research:

1. Honesty-Humility was found to be distinct from the Big 5 using data from an actual selection situation.

2. Honesty-Humility scores were found to predict scores on an integrity test and a business ethical decision-making task--adding predictive value beyond the Big 5.

3. Perhaps most interestingly, this result was replicated when honesty-humility was judged by those acquainted with the target person.

Implications? This adds weight to the argument that the Big 5 may need to be expanded to include additional personality dimensions--particularly if we're using it to predict behavior such as job performance.

There are other good articles in this issue, including ones on job performance ratings, counterproductive behavior in a service environment, post-retirement work, and others.