Activity and Resilience: How Personality Measures Predict Career Success in Academia

Abstract

Building on Hollenbeck and Mannor’s (2007) idea of scholarly success as a function of activity and resilience, the present study investigates whether junior researchers’ personality characteristics are predictive of academic career success. Participants completed a contextualized graded-paired comparison (GPC) personality assessment during their doctoral studies in 2007. The personality measures were matched with publication and job function data twelve years later ( N = 161 Dutch junior researchers). We theorized that achievement-striving and extraversion are indicative of activity, while emotional stability is indicative of resilience. Consistent with the activity-resilience model, the benefits of extraversion for scholarly impact were most evident when researchers also scored high on emotional stability. In contrast, achievement-striving independently predicted scholarly impact, particularly the h-index. We also found that contextualized personality measures had incremental validity, beyond standard big five personality measures in a subsample ( N = 66). Finally, through relationships with the h-index and publication counts, contextualized personality measures indirectly predicted the likelihood of attaining a faculty research position (i.e., assistant professor or higher). In two supplemental studies ( N = 99) we found that the content validity of the contextualized personality measures was only weakly associated with their predictive validity in the main study. This suggests that items which appear content valid are not necessarily the ones that best predict long-term performance, highlighting the importance of predictive validity studies. We discuss implications for research productivity and personality assessments.