Does success change people? Examining objective career success as a precursor for personality development

Does success change people? Examining objective career success as a precursor for personality development. Andreas Hirschi et al. Journal of Vocational Behavior, April 20 2021, 103582, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2021.103582

Highlights

• Tested if objective career success predicts changes in Big Five personality traits

• Representative German sample assessed three times over eight years was examined

• Career success (i.e., income and occupational prestige) predicted increase in openness

• Higher income predicted decrease in neuroticism

• Higher occupational prestige predicted decrease in extraversion

Abstract: Numerous studies established personality traits as predictors of career success. However, if and how career success can also trigger changes in personality has not received much attention. Drawing from the neosocioanalytic model of personality and its social investment and corresponsive principles, this paper investigated how the attainment of objective career success contributes to personality change in the Big Five traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. We conducted cross-lagged analyses with three measurement waves over eight years with a representative sample of 4′767 working adults from the German Socio-Economic Panel and examined if objective success (i.e., income and occupational prestige) predicted changes in personality. We also tested if effects differed across age groups or between men and women. Results showed that career success predicted changes in personality for neuroticism, extraversion, and openness. Higher income predicted a decrease in neuroticism and increase in openness. Higher prestige predicted a decrease in extraversion and an increase in openness. Results did not differ according to age group or for men or women. We discuss the results in light of the effects that career success can exert on personality development and the complexity inherent in observing personality change.

Keywords: Personality changeCareer successPrestigeIncomeSocial investment

3. Discussion

The aim of this paper was to test how personality traits change due to achieved objective career success. We thereby contribute to the limited research on the consequences of career success (Spurk et al., 2019) and to the literature on how work experiences affect changes in personality traits (Tasselli et al., 2018). We also contribute to personality-related vocational and counselling psychology research (Brown and Hirschi, 2013) by highlighting that personality traits not only can affect occupational attainment, but that occupational attainment can also lead to changes in personality. In an important extension of existing research, which is typically based on selective and non-representative convenience samples, we investigated our hypotheses in a large representative sample and conducted multigroup analyses to examine potential age group and gender differences. Globally, our results show evidence for personality change following career success and also that personality predicts career success.

Reciprocal Influences between Career Success and Personality.

The results of the cross-lagged analyses gave some evidence for the notion that career success prompts changes in personality. Higher income preceded a decrease in neuroticism, but an increase in openness. More prestige preceded an increase in openness and a decrease in extraversion. The direction of the relations for neuroticism and openness were expected, with success supporting the developmental trend of personality towards functional maturity over time as indicated by less neuroticism and more openness (Roberts and Wood, 2006).

The relation between neuroticism and income was reciprocal and negative, which confirms previous research in a smaller U.S. sample assessed with two measurement waves over 10 years (Sutin et al., 2009). These results suggest that neuroticism is a hindrance to the attainment of objective career success, presumably because achieving career success necessitates emotional stability, and dealing with stressful work challenges and uncertainties in a productive way. Based on the corresponsive principle (Roberts et al., 2003), the results moreover imply that attaining and sustaining success poses social role demands that are contrary to neuroticism, which leads successful people to suppress and decrease their neurotic tendencies over time.

The relation between openness and success was reciprocal and positive, also confirming our assumption and previous results that assessed the relation between upward job changes and openness in a representative Australian sample (Nieß and Zacher, 2015). The findings suggest that openness is a resource for the attainment of objective career success, presumably because attaining and maintaining success necessitates meeting intellectual role demands, such as being open to new ideas and opportunities or finding innovative solutions to challenges and problems at work. In turn, meeting such demands would activate and strengthen openness over time.

We had expected that extraversion would increase, not decrease, as a consequence of success. Previous research showed that aspects of extraversion, such as positive emotionality, are important for attaining success (Le et al., 2014; Roberts et al., 2003). However, some research found that while extraversion may be predictive of attaining positions with certain occupational characteristics, these same characteristics do not necessarily predict changes in extraversion (Wille and De Fruyt, 2014). Thus, it may be that once individuals attain a certain level of prestige, there is less need to be sociable, because one's position in interpersonal contexts is defined by one's status, and less by one's social relations. Moreover, successful individuals might depend less on the support from others, decreasing their need to be sociable. Hence, our findings suggest that being in a prestigious occupation might decrease sociable role demands, resulting in decreases of extraversion over time.

In terms of personality predicting success, we also observed that conscientiousness predicted a decrease in income, which goes against meta-analytic findings of a positive association between conscientiousness and salary and promotions (Ng et al., 2005; Ng and Feldman, 2014). However, research on the relation between conscientiousness and success has not produced consistent results, with several studies reporting no significant relation between conscientiousness and objective career success (e.g., Nyhus and Pons, 2005; Seibert and Kraimer, 2001). This suggests that the relation between conscientiousness and objective career success is not straightforward. The negative predictive effect of conscientiousness in our sample might be explained in the way that conscientious individuals tend to select conventional occupations (Barrick et al., 2003) which in some cases may include jobs with a lower salary (Ghetta et al., 2018). In addition, it may be that individuals with higher levels of conscientiousness may prefer to fulfill the duties in their current jobs and not look for higher success opportunities, which in turn, results in a decrease in income over time. In addition, some work demands associated with increased objective success, such as leading and supervising, might be in contradiction to typical aspects of high conscientiousness, such as rigidity or perfectionism, leading successful individuals to lower their manifestations of conscientiousness over time to achieve a better fit.

Our examinations on how career success predicts subsequent changes in personality also make a more general contribution to the investigation of the corresponsive principle of personality development (Roberts et al., 2003). Based on this perspective, we assumed the same traits that predict career success should also change as a result of career success and that attaining and maintaining objective success poses demands that trigger personality adjustment processes. We found support for corresponsive mechanisms for neuroticism and openness. For extraversion, success predicted a change in this trait, but this trait did not predict changes in success.

For agreeableness, no significant relations were observed in either direction. This is in contrast to research showing that agreeableness is negatively related to objective career success (Judge et al., 2012; Ng et al., 2005) and that individuals in positions with more responsibilities showed slower increases in agreeableness over time (Wille and De Fruyt, 2014). However, other studies found that more prosocial individuals (a characteristic closely related to agreeableness) have higher incomes (Eriksson et al., 2018). It could be that the relation with career success is thus more complex and moderated by other factors, such as occupation or organization. For example, in a more competitive climate where individual contributions are highly valued, agreeableness might be less positive for objective career success compared to in environments where cooperation and team performance are more important (Bolino and Grant, 2016). Also, being successful might cause individuals to be less depended on others and thus reduce their agreeableness. However, it could also be that the security of having achieved success might induce individual to become more invested in (pro)social activities (Harari et al., 2017), potentially increasing their agreeableness over time. Future research could more closely examine under which conditions agreeableness might relative positively or negatively with career success.

To understand the nonsignificant findings, it is also important to remember that objective career success and personality do not develop in a vacuum, and it is the merit of the social investment principle to have pointed attention to the different roles that people take up during the life course and their potential impact on personality development processes. For example, research showed that life events such as child birth or unemployment can have a meaningful impact on personality change (Denissen et al., 2019). Such live events could also affect the attainment of objective career success and can thus affect the relations between success and personality change in many ways that our study could not account for. As such, when applying the social investment principle and the corresponsive mechanism, it seems necessary to attend to multiple influences of personality development.

An inherent difficulty in empirically examining the claims of the social investment principle is determining at what time people start to invest in a particular role, and how investment in different roles at the same time works out across a longer time frame for individuals. Investing in two different roles at the same time may affect personality in similar ways, hence strengthening changes in a particular trait, but roles may also affect traits in opposite ways, without noticeable change. A promotion towards a more managerial job with more responsibilities and work demands may make someone more emotionally stable (i.e., lower in neuroticism), whereas a baby at home may challenge that person's neuroticism score in the opposite direction (Denissen et al., 2019). Such examples resulting from the social investment principle illustrate the complexities to demonstrate its claims and predictions.

Our findings also have important implications for vocational and counselling psychology research which is mostly focused on assessing traits as relatively stable predictors of career choices, vocational behavior, occupational attainment, and occupational niche-finding (Brown and Hirschi, 2013). Extending this literature, our study shows that occupational attainment can lead to changes in personality also in adulthood and that personality traits are thus more dynamically linked with vocational behavior and attainment than typically assumed. This insight could for example inform future theory and research on the social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent and Brown, 2013; Lent et al., 1994) which acknowledges that more distal person inputs in terms of personality traits can have important effects on vocational interests, career choices, performance, and career self-management behaviors. Our findings could extend this framework by investigating how career attainments can have feedback effects not only on more proximal but also more distal person factors, thereby acknowledging even more dynamic social cognitive processes in career development. Similarly, in career construction theory (Savickas, 2013) the framework of adaptivity, adaptability, adaptive responses, and adaptation (Hirschi et al., 2015) sees traits as components of adaptivity which predicts other outcomes. In extension, our findings suggest that adaptation outcomes could also lead to changes in adaptivity.

Moderating Effects.

Our multigroup comparisons showed no evidence for age group or gender differences in how personality traits and career success impact each other. While previous research has shown that personality change is most prominent in young adulthood (Schwaba and Bleidorn, 2018), our results show that career success and personality relate to each other in uniform ways across age. This suggests that sustained social investment in the work role, and the attainment of objective career success, can have an impact on individuals' personality not only in early or middle adulthood (Roberts et al., 2003; Roberts and Mroczek, 2008) but throughout the entire working lifespan into older age. Similarly, the impact that personality can have on career success attainment seems to remain consistent across age too. This suggests that the importance of personal characteristics for objective career success is not limited to the early career years, but that personality remains an influential factor throughout one's career.

Our results also showed that there are no differences between men and women in how success relates to personality change. This finding advances previous research focusing on gender differences in the relation between personality and success (Gelissen and de Graaf, 2006; Mueller and Plug, 2006; Nyhus and Pons, 2005). Our results are line with previous research showing that developmental trends of personality do not differ for men and women (Damian et al., 2018). Thus, while men and women may experience the work role differently and may attain differing salaries and levels of occupational prestige, the way that career success and personality impact each other seems consistent for men and women. Overall, our findings suggest that the attainment and maintenance of objective career success poses demands on personality traits that are comparable across age groups and gender, which leads to comparable effects of success on personality change across groups.

Limitations.

Our study has some notable strengths that include the use of a large, representative, heterogeneous sample spanning adulthood; cross-lagged analyses with three measurement points over several years; the consideration of age group and gender as moderators; and the use of objective indicators of career success. Nonetheless, some limitations of this study should be kept in mind when considering the results. First, several of the expected relations between success and personality were not confirmed in our study. Because we examined a representative and large sample and conducted a series of robustness checks, the nonsignificant findings are unlikely to result from sample bias or lack of statistical power. More likely is the interpretation that changes in income and occupational prestige are influenced by multiple factors, and so are changes in personality. This results in overall small direct effects, that in some cases become negligible. The relatively small effects found in our study thus caution against overstating the effects of success on personality. However, it is important to interpret effect sizes according to a meaningful benchmark (Funder and Ozer, 2019). We report cross-lagged effects, which take into account the stability of the construct and autoregressive effects over time. Because the examined constructs in our study are very stable, small cross-lagged effects can be expected. Indeed, the effects sizes reported in our study are comparable to the average cross-lagged effects between personality traits (e.g., self-esteem, positive emotionality) and other variables (e.g., social relationships, depression) reported in meta-analyses (Harris and Orth, 2019; Khazanov and Ruscio, 2016). It is also important to note that while all observed effects were small, small effects might be consequential over time (Funder and Ozer, 2019), and even small changes in personality can have a meaningful impact on an individual's life (Roberts et al., 2006). Second, the personality measure used in this study only included three items per personality trait. While the applied measure is comparable to other longer measures of personality (Donnellan and Lucas, 2008), the full scope of each personality trait is not covered. For example, the extraversion items in the applied measure cover sociability, but to a lesser extent positive emotions and energy. Investigations into personality facets and how these might change as a result of work success (Sutin et al., 2009) could therefore not be conducted. This could be important as research has shown that changes in traits (e.g., extraversion) can depend on which facets of the trait are investigated (Roberts et al., 2006; Soto et al., 2011a). It is thus possible that we failed to detect changes in specific facets of the examined traits.

Future Research.

Our study hypotheses were based on the corresponsive mechanism within the neosocioanalytic model of personality (Roberts et al., 2003). However, we were not able to directly test which specific expectations, norms, and rewards associated with career success lead to changes in traits. One area for future research would thus be to investigate possible mechanisms that explain why experiencing success at work leads to changes in personality. The social investment principle suggests that psychological role commitment is relevant for personality change (Lodi-Smith and Roberts, 2007). Hence, role involvement and commitment or job satisfaction may be possible mediators, or moderators, in the link between success and personality change. Furthermore, the expectations, norms, and demands associated with roles are an important source of personality change (Lodi-Smith and Roberts, 2007; Woods et al., 2019). Thus, future research may want to investigate to what extent the specific expectations, norms, and demands associated with successful positions, and the resulting behavior of the individual, prompt personality development. In situations where there is a clear behavior difference, as well as a clearer trait-behavior link, it may be more likely to observe the corresponsive mechanism at work.