What is conscientiousness?
With the history out of the way, we can turn our attention to the second half of this chapter — conscientiousness. Costa and McCrae understood conscientiousness as our tendency to live up to our responsibilities (1995). The responsibility meant here is broader than how we usually think of the word: it refers not only to the responsibility we bear towards other people or events, but, more importantly, to the responsibility we feel towards ourselves and towards society's expectations [1]. As with the other personality traits in the Big Five, conscientiousness has several sub-categories, which we will briefly introduce below.
Competence
Competence refers to how we appraise our own skills, capability and efficiency. It is closely related to the self-efficacy proposed by Albert Bandura, and it also has a strong connection with self-esteem [2]. People high in competence believe they are able to cope with the challenges of daily life, big and small; they tend to think actively and are very willing to put their skills and knowledge to use. People low in competence, by contrast, tend to feel useless, and are more spontaneous and unpredictable in how they act. Their strength, however, is a high capacity to adapt, and their direct, no-nonsense way of thinking also lets them notice the pros and cons of a situation straight away.
Dutifulness
The English word for conscientiousness, "conscientiousness", comes from "conscience" — roughly "good knowledge" in Chinese — and dutifulness refers to how far a person acts in line with that conscience and with social norms. People high in dutifulness usually keep their promises and adhere strictly to their own moral principles. They will do their utmost on every task, but it is precisely because they try so hard that they sometimes overcommit and get caught up in the details. People lower in dutifulness, on the other hand, are more flexible about following the rules and keeping their promises. They may give an impression of being unreliable, but in fact their relaxed attitude towards the small stuff can save them a great deal of time. At the same time, the goals they set themselves are sometimes more realistic [2].
Achievement-striving
As the name suggests, achievement-striving refers to a person's hunger for accomplishment. Those workaholics who "treat overtime as dinner" and "treat the office as home" are the classic case of people extremely high in achievement-striving. Brimming with ambition, they bring unmatched drive and energy to their careers or studies, as if every minute and every second of life were spent pressing towards a goal. For them, though, the price of striving for achievement is their relationships with family and friends, and they are more prone than others to burning out (burnout). People low in achievement-striving, by contrast, have no clear life plan and do not strive after fame or success. They may not have a string of achievements to show for it, but they are more willing to invest time in maintaining their relationships, which gives them a healthy social life.
The rest
Besides the three facets above, conscientiousness is in fact made up of three further sub-categories: self-discipline, order and deliberation. For a detailed explanation of these, see DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson (2007) [3].
Conscientiousness and procrastination
Research has found that conscientiousness has a strong relationship with procrastination. The findings of Dewitte & Schouwenburg (2002) [4] showed that conscientiousness and procrastination have a fairly strong negative correlation (r = -.69). In other words, possibly because of the influence of facets such as self-discipline, achievement-striving and dutifulness, the more conscientious a person is, the less likely they are to procrastinate.
What does conscientiousness have to do with career success?
By this point, the reader may already have the answer. Research has found that conscientiousness can accurately predict a person's long-term achievements, and in the workplace it matters even more than IQ [5]. Highly conscientious people tend to earn higher-than-average salaries and perform better at work [6], and they are also more satisfied with their jobs [7]. From this it appears that the behaviour driven by conscientiousness may shape a person's career success more than so-called innate talent.
Conclusion
As one of the five major personality traits in the Big Five theory, conscientiousness captures our tendency to live up to our responsibilities. As discussed above, conscientiousness is strongly related to success in both study and work. But in fact, beyond all that, conscientiousness is closely bound up with a person's mental and physical health. I still remember a personality psychology course at university where the professor said that raising your own conscientiousness is the single best investment you can make in your long-term future, bar none. I would warmly encourage interested readers to seek out the relevant academic literature.
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References
[1] Digman, J. M., & Takemoto-Chock, N. K. (1981). Factors In The Natural Language Of Personality: Re-Analysis, Comparison, And Interpretation Of Six Major Studies. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 16(2), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr1602_2
[2] Costa, P. T., McCrae, R. R., & Dye, D. A. (1991). Facet Scales for Agreeableness and Conscientiousness: A Revision of the NEO Personality Inventory. Personality and Individual Differences, 12(9), 887–898. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(91)90177-d
[3] DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
[4] Dewitte, S., & Schouwenburg, H. C. (2002). Procrastination, temptations, and incentives: the struggle between the present and the future in procrastinators and the punctual. European Journal of Personality, 16(6), 469–489. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.461
[5] Judge, T. A., Heller, D., & Mount, M. K. (2002). Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(3), 530–541. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.3.530
[6] Dudley, N. M., Orvis, K. A., Lebiecki, J. E., & Cortina, J. M. (2006). A meta-analytic investigation of conscientiousness in the prediction of job performance: Examining the intercorrelations and the incremental validity of narrow traits. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 40–57. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.1.40
[7] Judge, T. A., Higgins, C. A., Thoresen, C. J., & Barrick, M. R. (1999). The Bog Five personality traits, general mental abilities, and career success across the lifespan. Personnel Psychology, 52(3), 621–652. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1999.tb00174.x
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