THE 5 FACTOR MODEL OF PERSONALITY - OPENNESS A DISTINCT BUT RELATED CONSTRUCT

It has been argued that the Openness (O) dimension from the five facto r model (FFM) of personality may in fact be an associate of the abilit y domain more than the personality domain. This paper explores this hy pothesis using a sample of 101 managers. Participants completed the NE O-FFI and a measure of ability assessing the construct as typical perf ormance. This measure was an occupational specific measure of typical intellectual engagement (TIE), termed the ''problem solving through ch allenge'' PSC scale. A combination of LISREL CFA and hierarchical mult iple linear regression (HMLR) indicated that in fact O was a distinct but related construct to the other four dimensions of the FFM (N, E, A and C), but that O was more strongly correlated with PSC than the oth er dimensions. These results are taken to indicate that O, while assoc iated with personality, assesses something to do with problem solving as a personality trait. Further the results suggest that E linked O to the other personality scales. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All righ ts reserved.