The structure of conscientiousness: an empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires.

The purpose of this study was to identify the underlying structure of the trait domain of Conscientiousness using scales drawn from 7 major personality inventories. Thirty-six scales conceptually related to Conscientiousness were administered to a large community sample (N = 737); analyses of those scales revealed a hierarchical structure with 6 factors: industriousness, order, self-control, responsibility, traditionalism, and virtue. All 6 factors demonstrated excellent convergent validity. Three of the 6 factors, industriousness, order, and self-control, showed good discriminant validity. The remaining 3 factors--responsibility, traditionalism and virtue--appear to be interstitial constructs located equally between Conscientiousness and the remaining Big Five dimensions. In addition, the 6 underlying factors had both differential predictive validity and provided incremental validity beyond the general factor of Conscientiousness when used to predict a variety of criterion variables, including work dedication, drug use, and health behaviors.

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In recent years, interest in personality measurement has increased among applied psychologists because of studies demonstrating that personality variables predict performance across a diverse array of occupational groups (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp, & McCloy, 1990; Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991). Among the traits assessed by personality measures, Conscientiousness is arguably the most important. Measures of Conscientiousness have been shown to predict task performance (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 1993), contextual performance (Hogan, Rybicki, Motowidlo, & Borman, 1998; Ladd & Henry, 2000; McNeely & Meglino, 1994; Organ, 1994; Organ & Ryan, 1995), and a variety of outcomes related to adaptive social functioning. For example, Conscientiousness scores correlate positively with long-term career success (Judge, Higgins, Thoresen, & Barrick, 1999), college retention (Tross, Harper, Osher, & Kneidinger, 2000), marital stability (Kelly & Conley, 1987; Tucker, Kressin, Spiro, & Ruscio, 1998), healthy lifestyle behaviors (Booth-Kewley & Vickers, 1994; Roberts & Bogg, 2004), and longevity (Friedman, Tucker, Tomlinson-Keasey, Schwartz, Wingard, & Criqui, 1993).

Although these studies suggest that Conscientiousness has both predictive and descriptive value, this generalization is somewhat inappropriate. Many studies of Conscientiousness involved different definitions of the construct. Some researchers measured Conscientiousness in terms of achievement, whereas others focused on order, impulse control, or responsibility. Moreover, recent research suggests that the lower-order facets of Conscientiousness provide as good or better prediction of behavioral outcomes than composite measures (Ashton, 1998; Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988; Paunonen, 1998; Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). For example, Stewart (1999) found that the order facet of Conscientiousness strongly correlated with the performance of newly hired employees, but the achievement facet strongly correlated with the performance of veteran employees; both facets had substantially higher correlations with performance when examined individually than when combined. Even more importantly, lower-order facets sometimes show differential relationships with performance criteria. For example, Moon (2001) found that a composite measure of Conscientiousness had zero relationship with performance, defined as the escalation of commitment tasks; yet, two lower-order facets, achievement and duty, showed substantial, but opposite, relationships with the performance criterion. In addition, LePine, Colquitt, and Erez (2000) found that an order-dependability composite exhibited a negative correlation with adaptation to changing task contexts, but achievement showed no relationship.

In sum, these results suggest that more attention should be devoted to studying the lower-order facets of Conscientiousness. In fact, a growing number of studies focusing on narrow Conscientiousness traits are beginning to appear in the applied psychology literature. For example, Dudley, Orvis, and Lebiecki (2003) recently conducted a meta-analysis of relationships between four lower-order Conscientiousness traits and a number of criteria, including job and task performance, job dedication, and counterproductive behaviors. One problem confronting the organization of studies in this way is the complete lack of an acceptable lower-order taxonomy of Conscientiousness facets. Hough and colleagues have long argued that an adequate personality taxonomy at the facet level is critical to the understanding of the relationships between personality variables and criteria of interest to industrial/organizational psychologists and that research at the Big Five level may obscure important differences in the way personality facets may relate differentially to criteria (Hough, 1992; Hough & Furnham, 2003; Hough & Ones, 2001; Hough & Oswald, 2000; Hough & Schneider, 1996). Clearly, taxonometric work in the area of Conscientiousness (and other Big Five factors) is critical for the future synthesis of work-related research.

In this paper, we empirically derived an initial taxonomy for the lower-order facets of Conscientiousness by analyzing scale scores from seven widely used inventories. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify facets of Conscientiousness that were clearly interpretable. Then, confirmatory factor analysis and correlations with the remaining Big Five, demographic variables, and a set of criterion variables were used to examine convergent, discriminant, and incremental validities of the lower-order Conscientiousness facets.

Current Views on the Structure of Conscientiousness