Abstract:

Chinese personality traits had uniquely differences from other culture due to the China’s special geography and collectivist culturally background, therefore, the philosophy of localization was accepted and advocated by more and more Chineses psychologist. Meanwhile, the nonlinear relationships between personality traits and job performance have been found in some studies. These results transformed the traditional top-down strategy to double strategies for the applications of personality tests in psychology of personnel management. However, there were no research to combine the linear and nonlinear models together to examine the relationships between indigenous personality traits and job performance in the Chinese working setting. In the current study, we explored the linear and/or nonlinear relationships between indigenous personality traits and job performance. The participants were 182 service employees from several service industries in Beijing, and the direct supervisors of the respondents provided ratings of job performance and returned independently to the interviewers. The ratings of job performance was self-compiled based on job analysis and deep interview. Confirmatory factor analysis found the one-factor performance model had a better goodness of fit (X2=27.79, df=8, CFI=.95, NFI=.93, RMSEA=.07), and coefficient alphas was .85. Meanwhile, the nine subscales from CPAI-2 were selected to assess the indigenous personality traits: face (FAC), family orientation (FAM), defensiveness (DEF), graciousness vs. meanness (G_M), veraciousness vs. slickness (V_S), traditionalism vs. modernity (T_M), renqing (REN), harmony (HAR) and thrift vs. extravagance (T_E). The mean Cronbach’s a coefficient for the entire set of personality scales was .70 in the representative normal sample in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. The data were analyzed with spss 15.0, and the main statistics methods were correlation analysis and hierarchical polynomial regression analysis. The results were as follow: (1) HAR and job performance had a positive linear relationship(βL= .16, p < .05), the result was similar with the previous studies, and confirmed the important of relationship harmony in Chinese culture; (2) FAC and job performance had a reversed-U curve relationship(βQ =-.22, p <.05), indicated that compared to those who were low in face, highly gaining face persons tended to perform well on the job, and therefore were likely to achieve better performance depended on his/her personal efforts in order to ‘care for their face’ through hard work. However, after a certain point(ZFAC=-.07), excessively avoiding losing face in advance or retrieving face after the event may no longer be helpful to job performance. (3) REN and job performance had a letter U curve relationship(βQ = .15, p < .05), indicated that the low and high scores on the renqing scales had a better performance. This wasn’t consistent with our expectation, because of the personality traits and job performance usually had a reversed-U curve in previous study. The current result maybe due to the special status of renqing in Chinese society. In the end, we pointed that the results should be repeated in different samples and jobs before generalization.

Key words: personality traits, Indigenous, job performance, linear, nonlinear

摘要：

采用跨文化（中国人）个性测量表（Cross-Cultural [Chinese] Personality Assessment Inventory, 简称CPAI-2）对182名服务企业员工进行本土化人格特质测查，并同时获得其直接上级主管对他/她工作绩效的评定。目的是探讨本土化人格特质与工作绩效之间的关系模式（线性或非线性）。结果表明：和谐性与工作绩效具有正向的线性关系；面子与工作绩效具有倒U曲线关系；人情与工作绩效具有正U曲线关系；其他本土化人格特质与工作绩效的关系均不显著。

关键词: 人格特质, 本土化, 工作绩效, 线性, 非线性