Meta-analysis of bidirectional relations in personality-job performance research

Standard meta-analysis (Hunter & Schmidt, 1990a) assumes unidirectional (i. e., all positive or all negative) predictor-criterion relations. We challen ge this assumption in the context of personality-job performance linkages b ased on several limes of evidence supporting the coexistence of true positi ve and true negative correlations involving the same trait. Subjecting such bidirectional relations to standard meta-analysis will underestimate effec t sizes to an unknown degree owing to cancellation of positive and negative values. A modification of standard procedures is proposed that accounts fo r the possibility of bidirectionality. It employs successive iteration of a n initial estimate of the absolute correlation, accounting for sample sizes and the sampling distribution of the correlation. Tests of the procedure u sing hypothetical distributions show it works as expected. Application to p reviously documented personality-job performance relations (Tett, Jackson, & Rothstein, 1991) yields interpretable effect sizes substantially stronger than previously reported estimates. Implications for interpreting prior me ta-analytic findings in this area are discussed.