About 11pct of participants evaluated their conscientiousness as adequate, 75pct thought it was "too high" (?!)

Too little, just right or too much? Assessing how people evaluate their conscientiousness levels. Sofie Dupré et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 197, October 2022, 111789. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111789

Abstract: Recent advances in personality theory and research have led to the introduction of the “Too-much-of-a-good-thing-effect” in the relationship between conscientiousness and desirable outcomes, challenging the “more is better” idea that has been dominating research on this trait for a long time. Thus, the question arises as to how people evaluate their conscientiousness levels themselves, more specifically, whether they regard their trait levels as “too little”, “the right amount”, or “too much”. The current study describes how an existing personality inventory can be adjusted to explore such evaluations of conscientiousness levels by incorporating a too little/too much response format. The structural characteristics of this new assessment approach are examined and compared against responses that are collected using a traditional Likert rating format asking people to describe themselves. Results show that – in this sample (N = 367) – about 11 % of participants evaluated their conscientiousness as adequate, whereas the majority (75 %) indicated it to be too high. Further, the “right amount” of conscientiousness was most frequently associated with a 7 on a 9-point Likert scale, while very high Likert-scale ratings of 9 were regarded as “too much” in over three-fourth of the ratings. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Introduction

High conscientiousness is a reliable correlate of multiple desirable outcomes in different areas of people's lives, such as physical and psychological well-being (Friedman, Kern, & Reynolds, 2010), academic success (Mammadov, 2021), and work performance (Wilmot & Ones, 2019). Although these conscientiousness-outcome relations have been deemed positive and linear in most research (i.e., “more is better”), contradictory evidence from recent lines of theoretical and empirical work indicates that there may be such a thing as being too conscientious (e.g., Carter et al., 2014; Carter, Guan, Maples, Williamson, & Miller, 2016; Denissen et al., 2018; Le et al., 2011). This phenomenon – also referred to as the “Too-much-of-a-good-thing-effect” (TMGT effect; Pierce & Aguinis, 2013) – raises the question how people feel about or evaluate their conscientiousness levels. While current personality assessment instruments provide valuable insights into people's positions on the underlying trait dimension, they cannot capture such evaluations (i.e., whether people regard their trait levels as “too little”, “the right amount”, or “too much”). The current study is a first effort to explore how people evaluate their conscientiousness levels by introducing the too little/too much rating scale (Kaiser & Kaplan, 2005) in personality assessment.

Although the TMGT-effect manifests in different life domains (Pierce & Aguinis, 2013), evidence for this effect regarding conscientiousness has mainly been reported in the work setting, where curvilinear relationships have been demonstrated with various indicators of job performance. That is, several studies demonstrate that employees with moderate conscientiousness levels tend to perform better than those with very high levels (Carter et al., 2014; Denissen et al., 2018; Le et al., 2011). Highly conscientious employees may be so perfectionist that they waste time on unimportant details. Importantly, Le et al. (2011) found that higher levels of conscientiousness only become detrimental to performance in low-complexity jobs, which demonstrates the importance of the work context in explaining the nature of the curvilinear relationship. Similarly, Denissen et al. (2018) showed that high conscientiousness in employees has a detrimental effect on performance when conscientiousness exceeds the level their job demands, which provides further evidence for the significance of a good match between personality and the job context.

While the issue of curvilinearity has been mainly addressed in research on the conscientiousness-performance relationship, it is not exclusive to the work context. For example, Carter et al. (2016) found a similar trend in the relation between conscientiousness and psychological well-being. Taken together, these findings raise the possibility that people who report higher conscientiousness levels potentially experience these trait levels as a hindrance in life, and may feel that lower levels are more desirable.

For decades, psychologists have been in pursuit of valid and reliable ways to assess people's personality, but despite the emergence of a multitude of instruments, none have aimed to capture the way people evaluate their reported trait levels. While Likert scales are designed to grasp the person's actual position on the underlying trait, they are not intended to reveal discrepancies between actual trait levels and desired trait levels. For example, people who rate themselves as highly conscientious on a Likert scale may regard these levels as either adequate or potentially “too high”. Similarly, people with lower Likert-scale rated levels are not necessarily dissatisfied with these levels. Previous efforts have been made toward better operationalizing potential adaptive and maladaptive functioning at both poles of a trait dimension, such as the Five Factor Form (FFF) and the Sliderbar Inventory (SI) (Rojas & Widiger, 2018). However, like the Likert scale, these scales are still aimed at – more accurately – describing people's trait levels.

Similar remarks were made previously by Kaiser and Kaplan (2005), who aimed to assess deficiency and/or excess in leadership behavior. In their study, they suggested a new rating scale format: the too little/too much rating scale, ranging from −4 (too little) to 0 (the right amount) and +4 (too much) (Kaiser & Kaplan, 2005). The usefulness of this scale lies in its ability to tap into perceived overdoing or underdoing, which are areas of functioning not captured by the Likert scale rating format. In the current study, our goal is to introduce this scale in personality assessment to explore employees' evaluations of their conscientiousness levels.

The current study presents the development and validation of a personality instrument that focuses on mapping people's evaluations of their conscientiousness levels (“too much”, “too little”, or “the right amount”) rather than the actual conscientiousness levels (1 = very low; 9 = very high). The characteristics of this instrument will be investigated in two ways. First, the factor structure of the TLTM-rated version will be compared to that of the traditional Likert-rated version of the instrument. Second, associations between ratings on TLTM- and Likert- versions of the instrument will be investigated to build an understanding of how people evaluate different conscientiousness trait levels.