RESEARCH STUDY CRITIQUE

Research Study Critique

Research Study Critique

Introduction

This paper provides a critical analysis of a research paper written by a team of authors including Erdheim, Wang, and Zickar. This research study was published in “Personality and Individual Differences” in the year 2006. In this particular research study, the authors have examined the relationship between organizational commitment and the big five personality traits. According to the authors of this study, the word personality has two definitions, and the distinction between them is important.

Literature Review

On the one hand, personality can be defined from the viewpoint of an actor and concerns a person's identity. On the other hand, personality can be defined from the viewpoint of an observer and concerns a person's reputation. Reputation reflects the distinctive features of another's behavior; trait words are used to describe how a person is perceived by others. Each person's reputation can be described using the Big Five personality dimensions in the following terms:

Quiet and unassertive versus active and outgoing (extraversion/surgency)

Hard-nosed and tough versus tactful and sensitive (agreeableness)

Impulsive and careless versus dependable and conforming (conscientiousness)

Nervous and moody versus calm and assured (emotional stability)

Narrow and unimaginative versus curious and imaginative (intellect/openness to experience) (Erdheim, Wang, Zickar, 2006)

One answer to the question of what to include, when measuring personality, is to assess the major components of reputation—the Big Five. Some personality inventories assess Big Five constructs, although scale labels are not consistent with the Big Five terminology. Only a few recently developed inventories explicitly measure the Big Five, and these usually have different scale labels for the same constructs. Before 1990 many researchers doubted the validity of personality measures for predicting occupational performance.

However, when the Big Five structure is used to organize personality scales across studies, accumulated results indicate that personality measures significantly predict of a wide range of performance for virtually every job in the world of work. The study of personality and leadership is a specific instance of this state of affairs (Erdheim, Wang, Zickar, 2006).

According to the authors, Although organizational commitment might be expected to develop on the basis of both person and work experience factors, the latter play the more important role. Some person variables (e.g., age, locus of control) are modestly related to OC, but it is what people experience at work that seems to have the most influence on OC development. With respect to affective commitment, quantitative review (or meta-analysis) suggests several work experiences that seem particularly important (Erdheim, Wang, Zickar, 2006).

Affective commitment is stronger among employees who feel that they have been supported by their organizations and who have experienced procedural, distributive, and interactional justice in the workplace. Affective commitment is also stronger among employees who experience minimal role ambiguity and role conflict at work and have leaders who adopt transformational leadership styles.

Organizational commitment has three distinct components. Each develops via somewhat different processes and represents a distinct psychological tie that binds the employee to the organization. Affective commitment refers to the employee's emotional attachment to the organization, characterized by an ...