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RESEARCH REPORT

Linking Job-Relevant Personality Traits, Transformational Leadership, and Job Performance via Perceived Meaningfulness at Work: A Moderated Mediation

Model

Rachel E. Frieder Strome College of Business, Old Dominion University

Gang Wang College of Business, Florida State University

In-Sue Oh Fox School of Business, Temple University

By integrating the fundamental principles of the theory of purposeful work behavior (TPWB; Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013) with cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) theory (Mischel, 1977; Mischel & Shoda, 1995), we examine how and when salespeople’s job-relevant personality traits relate to their performance. We argue that individuals with personality traits that fit outdoor sales jobs (i.e., consci- entious, extraversion, openness to experience) will perceive their work as more meaningful and as a result achieve heightened performance. Moreover, drawing from TPWB and CAPS theory, we expect that as an important element of the social context, transformational leadership moderates the indirect effect of salespeople’s job-relevant personality traits on their job performance via enhanced perceptions of meaningfulness at work. Results based on data from 496 outdoor salespeople and their 218 supervisors and regional managers provide support for the hypotheses pertaining to conscientiousness and openness, but not extraversion. Specifically, the conditional indirect effects of conscientiousness or openness on performance through perceived meaningfulness are more positive under low, rather than high, levels of transformational leadership. Implications for research and practice are discussed along with study limitations and future research directions.

Keywords: conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, transformational leadership, meaningfulness

In the organizational sciences, predicting and explaining job performance represents a major research question across various disciplines (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013). Some scholars even argue that job performance is the “ultimate dependent variable, if not its raison d’etre” (Organ & Paine, 1999, p. 337). To this end, personality researchers have been searching for employee person- ality traits that predict employee job performance (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; Hurtz & Donovan, 2000). Meanwhile, leadership

researchers have been looking for leader traits, behaviors, and styles that can effectively improve individual follower job perfor- mance (e.g., DeRue, Nahrgang, Wellman, & Humphrey, 2011; Griffin & Hu, 2013). On the surface, the two groups of researchers belong to two different camps and conduct different research. However, in reality, they oftentimes study the same population of working adults: “employees” for personality researchers are also “followers” for leadership researchers.

With respect to interdisciplinary research, personality research- ers have rarely considered leader factors, perhaps in part because they are more interested in offering implications for personnel selection practices to which the influence of leader behavior on employee performance is less relevant (Ostroff & Bowen, 2016). Similarly, leadership scholars have “very often” left followers “out of the leadership research equation” (Uhl-Bien, Riggio, Lowe, & Carsten, 2014, p. 83), perhaps in part because they are more interested in providing implications for leadership development and evaluation to which the role of follower traits on follower performance is less relevant. We note that although follower characteristics have been included in both classic (e.g., Fiedler, 1967; Hersey & Blanchard, 1977; House, 1971, 1996; Kerr & Jermier, 1978) and contemporary (e.g., Li, Chiaburu, Kirkman, & Xie, 2013) contingency models of leadership, they are considered

This article was published Online First October 9, 2017. Rachel E. Frieder, Department of Management, Strome College of

Business, Old Dominion University; Gang Wang, Department of Manage- ment, College of Business, Florida State University; In-Sue Oh, Depart- ment of Human Resource Management, Fox School of Business, Temple University.

Rachel E. Frieder and Gang Wang contributed equally to this article. We thank Jerry Ferris and Zhen Zhang for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rachel E. Frieder, Department of Management, Strome College of Business, Old Dominion University, 2171 Constant Hall, Norfolk, VA 23529. E-mail: [email protected]

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Journal of Applied Psychology © 2017 American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 103, No. 3, 324–333 0021-9010/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000274

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only “from the point of view of their susceptibility to certain leader behaviors or styles” (Howell & Shamir, 2005, p. 97) or “as recipients or moderators of the leader’s influence” (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014, p. 83).

Against this backdrop, in order to cross-fertilize personality and leadership research streams while overcoming a major weakness in each research stream, it is important to reverse the lens and examine followers (or employees) as causal agents who shape their own performance while taking into account leader factors in this process (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). To advance such knowledge, we integrate personality and leadership research to examine how fol- lowers’ personality traits relate to their job performance and the potential moderating roles of leadership behavior as a situational factor. As we detail in the next section, the theory of purposeful work behavior (TPWB; Barrick et al., 2013) is a recent theoretical framework that pinpoints follower personality traits that are rele- vant to our research context, posits how these follower personality traits relate to follower job performance, and suggests which leadership behavior may play a moderating role. Additionally, we integrate TPWB with cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) theory (Mischel, 1977; Mischel & Shoda, 1995) to predict the pattern of the moderating role played by the leadership behav- ior in the process through which the follower personality traits relate to follower job performance.

Taken together, we believe our research makes several interre- lated contributions. Specifically, we contribute to the dearth of research on followers’ active role in the leadership process by theorizing and examining (a) a mediating process through which follower job-relevant personality traits drive follower job perfor- mance and (b) a moderating role of leadership in the mediating process. Second, this study contributes to the applied personality literature by extending and testing TPWB’s (Barrick et al., 2013) applicability by examining the theory in conjunction with CAPS theory in a contextualized manner. Moreover, this study contrib- utes to TPWB by enriching the discussion on congruent versus incongruent job environments by considering the moderating role of leadership behavior as social contexts. Finally, we also believe that this study contributes to the leadership literature by explicat- ing and testing the potential moderating role of theoretical relevant leadership behavior in linking followers’ job-relevant traits to job performance.

Theoretical Foundations and Hypothesis Development

TPWB is focused on the five-factor model (FFM) of personality, a unifying and consistently validated framework that describes individuals’ personality traits (Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1992). The general thrust of TPWB is that implicit higher-order goal strivings that emerge from and are inherent in the FFM traits enable employees to experience meaningfulness at work, which in turn increases their task-specific motivated behavior and ulti- mately job performance. Barrick et al. (2013) identified four primary implicit higher-order goals that stem from the FFM traits: achievement-, status-, communion-, and autonomy-strivings. In- stead of proposing a “one-size-fit-all” model, TPWB further posits that the FFM traits would be stronger drivers of job performance through perceived meaningfulness when an individual’s job con- tains characteristics that facilitate implicit higher-order goal striv- ings inherent in his or her personality traits. For example, openness

to experience tends to strongly relate to performance in a job that requires working independently by allowing open-minded individ- uals to strive for autonomy and subsequently feel heightened perceived meaningfulness.

To take into account the job-related nature of TPWB, we believe it is appropriate to test the core tenet of TPWB within the context of an outdoor sales job, because it satisfies a primary assumption of TPWB that incumbents can “act as they want or as they ‘really are’.” Moreover, several unique features of this job tend to activate conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience to initiate trait-relevant, implicit higher-order achievement, status, and autonomy strivings respectively, which in turn shape up sales- people’s perceptions of meaningfulness at work and ultimately their work behavior (Barrick et al., 2013, p. 139). First, specific and challenging sales targets with set deadlines and frequent feedback regarding the accomplishment of the sales targets are conducive to highly conscientious salespeople’s implicit higher- order achievement strivings (Frink & Ferris, 1999). Second, com- petition with fellow salespeople on attaining sales targets and winning over customers on sales terms tends to enable highly extraverted salespeople to pursue implicit higher-order status striv- ing (Stewart, 1996). Lastly, because salespeople in an outdoor sales job work independently and away from the premises of their organization, control over how and when to achieve sales targets allows open-minded salespeople to engage in implicit higher-order autonomy striving. Taken together, empirical evidence suggests that conscientious, extraverted, and open-minded individuals thrive in outdoor sales jobs (e.g., Vinchur, Schippmann, Switzer, & Roth, 1998). As such, outdoor salespeople high in these three traits are likely to perceive high levels of meaningfulness by pursuing their implicit higher-order goals and should ultimately perform well.

In addition, TPWB suggests that work contexts (e.g., leadership) may “facilitate or constrain the extent to which personality traits can be naturally enacted in the pursuit of higher-order goals and thereby influence whether individuals’ purposeful work striving is perceived as meaningful” (Barrick et al., 2013, p. 137). Leadership research indicates that transformational leadership represents a work context that matters to employees’ perceptions of meaning- fulness in that compared to other leaders, transformational leaders more effectively connect followers’ mundane work roles with collective goals and thus give rise to followers’ perceived mean- ingfulness (e.g., Bono & Judge, 2003; Grant, 2008; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006). Specifically, transformational leaders motivate followers by articulating a compelling vision, serving as role models, stimulating their followers intellectually, and attending to each follower’s unique career development needs by providing individualized coaching and mentoring (Bass, 1985).

Although “it is difficult to specify the motivational mechanism linking leaders and followers” (Bono & Judge, 2003, p. 555), CAPS theory complements TPWB and provides insight into the moderating role of transformational leadership in the process through which salespeople’s job-relevant personality traits relate to their job performance. According to CAPS theory (Mischel & Shoda, 1995), human behavior is best predicted and understood when the person, the situation, and their interaction are fully considered; more specifically, the effect of the person on behavior is strong in weak situations (e.g., in which there are low levels of conformity pressure) but weak in strong situations. Accordingly, we argue that a high level of transformational leadership functions

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325PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP

as a strong situation that weakens the relationships of salespeople’s job-relevant traits with their perceived meaningfulness by elevat- ing perceived meaningfulness of salespeople low in job-relevant traits and thus reducing variance in this variable; salespeople high in these job-relevant traits have little room for improvement in perceiving meaningfulness (Bono & Judge, 2003). In this way, a high level of transformational leadership indirectly weakens the relationships between salespeople’s job-relevant traits and their job performance. Our theoretical model1 is summarized in Figure 1.

The Conditional Indirect Effect of Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness describes an individual’s tendency toward achievement, work motivation, organization and planning, and self-control (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Highly conscientious indi- viduals are hardworking, persistent, and goal-oriented. As such, highly conscientious salespeople are likely to better accomplish assigned sales goals and other responsibilities at work; doing so allows them to fulfill their implicit achievement striving and gain a sense of meaningfulness (Ingledew, Markland, & Sheppard, 2004).

However, as suggested in TPWB, social contexts such as lead- ership may “interact with the personal agendas that emerge from individual’s personality traits to determine experienced meaning- fulness” (Barrick et al., 2013, p. 137). Leaders play a critical role in providing social-informational cues influential that shape em- ployees’ perceptions of their jobs (Ferris & Rowland, 1981). In particular, transformational leaders are effective at influencing followers’ meaning construction and sensemaking processes, be- cause they are able to connect followers’ routine work roles with collective goals and direct employees’ attentional focus toward the positive impact of their jobs (e.g., Bono & Judge, 2003; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

In particular, by focusing on the achievement of collective goals and leading by example, transformational leaders provide clear guidance and set strong norms for followers as to what are ex- pected work attitudes and behavior (Bass, 1985). Thus, highly transformational leaders create a strong situation that more greatly elevates less, rather than highly, conscientious followers’ per- ceived meaningfulness by prompting them to pursue implicit higher-order achievement-striving goals, thus substantially reduc- ing variance in followers’ perceptions of meaningfulness (Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006). In other words, under high levels of transformational leadership (i.e., a strong situation), followers should perceive similar levels of mean- ingfulness regardless of their level of conscientiousness and ulti- mately have similar job performance because transformational leaders shape the context in which followers operate by clearly defining, reinforcing, and rewarding desirable sales behaviors. However, under low levels of transformational leadership, leaders are less involved in meaning creation and sensemaking. Therefore, in these weak situations, salespeople’s perceptions of meaningful- ness should be more influenced by their innate implicit higher- order achievement striving arising from conscientiousness (Bar- rick et al., 2013). As such, low levels of transformational leadership facilitate the extent to which highly conscientious sales- people view their work as more meaningful and in turn perform better than their less conscientious counterparts.

Hypothesis 1: Transformational leadership moderates the in- direct effect of salespeople’s conscientiousness on job perfor- mance through perceived meaningfulness at work, such that the indirect effect will be less (more) positive when followers perceive their leaders to be high (low) on transformational leadership.

The Conditional Indirect Effect of Extraversion

Extraversion describes an individual’s tendency to gain power and status (Côté & Moskowitz, 1998). Compared to introverts who are drained by interactions with others and prefer impersonal work environments, extraverts are outgoing, gregarious, ambitious, and characterized by sociability and dominance (Perrewé & Spector, 2002). Extraverts desire to get ahead and attain attention and rewards/power (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002). Sales positions are consistent with extraverts’ motives for both sociabil- ity and ambition (e.g., striving for power); therefore, sales jobs allow extraverts to pursue their implicit status strivings by achiev- ing and/or surpassing sales goals (Hogan, 1986; Vinchur et al., 1998).

Transformational leaders can better shape informational and contextual cues in such a way as to infuse heightened understand- ing (e.g., of one’s customers, products, and typical sales interac- tions; Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). Moreover, they provide a com- pelling vision for their followers, set high-performance standards, and align such expectations with collective goals (e.g., Bass, 1985). Hence, transformational leadership represents a strong situa- tion (e.g., Mischel, 1977) that more greatly enhances introverted, rather than extraverted, followers’ perceived meaningfulness by trig- ging them to pursue status-striving goals, thus substantially reducing variance in followers’ perceptions of meaningfulness. That is, under high levels of transformational leadership, followers, regardless of their level of extraversion, should perceive similar levels of meaning- fulness and ultimately have similar job performance. However, less transformational leaders are unlikely to align and direct their intro- verted followers’ attentional focus to the meaningful aspects of their jobs. In such weak situations, extraverted salespeople will meet their need for status and power and experience a heightened sense of meaningfulness (Ingledew et al., 2004; Rich, LePine, & Crawford, 2010) by pursuing status-striving goals and consequently will perform better than their introverted counterparts (Barrick et al., 2002).

Hypothesis 2: Transformational leadership moderates the in- direct effect of salespeople’s extraversion on their job perfor- mance through perceived meaningfulness at work, such that the indirect effect will be less (more) positive when followers perceive their leaders to be high (low) on transformational leadership.

1 Notably, we only use the implicit higher-order goal strivings as orga- nizing frameworks to inform our following hypotheses, because TPWB posits that these goal strivings operate in an implicit and subconscious manner and their close relationships with corresponding job-relevant traits have been established (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, & Piotrowski, 2002).

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The Conditional Indirect Effect of Openness to Experience

Individuals with high openness to experience are broad-minded, intellectual, curious, imaginative, creative, and proactive (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Highly open-minded individuals prefer to exper- iment with new ideas and/or explore tasks that are ambiguous or loosely defined (Barrick & Mount, 1991). TPWB posits that these individuals tend to pursue autonomy-striving goals (Barrick et al., 2013); they seek to understand and control their environments and prefer environments that provide them with the freedom to decide how, when, and what work gets done (Morgeson & Humphrey, 2006).

Transformational leaders encourage their followers to think outside the box and challenge their assumptions by empowering them with individualized mentoring and coaching (Bass, 1985; Grant, 2012). Thus, transformational leadership represents a strong situation (e.g., Mischel, 1977) that more greatly increases less, rather than more, open-minded followers’ perceived meaningful- ness by prompting them to pursue autonomy-striving goals, thus substantially reducing variance in followers’ perceptions of mean- ingfulness (Barrick et al., 2013); hence, in these strong situations, despite of their levels of openness, followers should perceive similar levels of meaningfulness and in turn perform similarly. However, less transformational leaders are unlikely to tailor their mentoring and coaching nor challenge followers to think outside the box. Thus, in these weak situations, sales jobs allow more open individuals to pursue their autonomy strivings by seeking out opportunities on their own and operating relatively independent of their supervisors (Vinchur et al., 1998). Therefore, we suggest that low levels of transformational leadership represent a weak situa- tion that facilitates the extent to which more open-minded sales- people pursue their implicit autonomy-striving goals; accordingly, they should perceive their work to be more meaningful and thus perform better than their less open-minded peers (Barrick et al., 2013).

Hypothesis 3: Transformational leadership moderates the in- direct effect of salespeople’s openness to experience on their job performance through perceived meaningfulness at work, such that the indirect effect will be less (more) positive when followers perceive their leaders to be high (low) on transfor- mational leadership.

Method

Participants and Procedures

Data for this study were collected from employees in the out- door sales division of an educational services company in South Korea. Sales representatives were tasked with selling tutoring products for primary school students door-to-door and via other methods (e.g., phone calls, e-mails). They worked mostly inde- pendently in a designated sales area but spent a bit more than one workday (on average, 8–10 hours) interacting with their cowork- ers and/or supervisors face-to-face (e.g., managing customer data- bases, attending regular performance meetings led by their direct or regional supervisors, assisting staff in nonsales functions when necessary).

Through the support of the company’s HR staff, 1,525 sales employees were invited to participate in this voluntary study. Employees were asked to report demographic information, person- ality, perceived meaningfulness, and perceptions of their direct supervisor’s transformational leadership. Five hundred and seven employees returned the survey with their identification number. We excluded 11 employees who responded to many items without any variation. The final sample of 496 employees was 42% male, educated (i.e., 93% held an associate’s degree or higher), and was mainly between 20 and 30 years of age. One month later, 91 direct supervisors and 127 regional managers assessed the 496 employ- ees’ job performance. The responses were matched using the employee identification numbers.

Measures

As suggested by our theoretical model, all variables in this study were conceptualized as individual-level constructs. All measures were carefully translated into Korean using the back-translation procedures recommended by Brislin (1980).

Personality traits. Conscientiousness (� � .81; e.g., “At work I am always prepared”), extraversion (� � .73; e.g., “I talk to a lot of different people at work”), and openness to experience (� � .76; e.g., “At work, I am full of ideas”) were each measured with 10 items from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Goldberg, 1999). Participants responded to all personality items on a 5-point Likert scale (1 � strongly disagree to 5 � strongly agree). To direct participants to their personality manifested in

Perceived transformational

leadership

Job-relevant personality traits

Perceived meaningfulness

at work Job performance

Figure 1. Proposed moderated mediation model linking job-relevant traits to job performance in outdoor sales contexts.

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327PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP

their workplace and to potentially improve the validity of person- ality for job performance, we added at work to each personality item.

Perceived meaningfulness at work. Consistent with its con- ceptual definition in TPWB as “the perceived significance or meaning an individual draws from engaging in work activities” (Barrick et al., 2013, p. 133), perceived meaningfulness (� � .81) was operationalized using the four-item task significance subscale of the revised form of the Job Diagnostic Survey (Idaszak & Drasgow, 1987). “The job itself is very significant and important in the broader scheme of things” represents a sample item. Partic- ipants were asked to report their perceptions of meaningfulness on a 5-point Likert scale (1 � very inaccurate to 5 � very accurate).

Transformational leadership. Employees were asked to re- port the extent to which they perceived their formal direct super- visor as transformational (� � .94) on a 5-point scale (1 � not at all; 5 � frequently, if not always) using the 20-item Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ; Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1999).

Job performance. Employees’ job performance was assessed with Williams and Anderson’s (1991) seven-item in-role perfor- mance measure on a 5-point Likert scale (1 � strongly disagree to 5 � strongly agree). A sample item includes “He/she performs tasks that are expected of him/her.” Each employee’s job perfor- mance was determined as the average of ratings of their direct supervisor and one or two regional managers depending on the size of the region. On average, 2.4 raters provided performance ratings for each employee. The mean correlation across the raters was .52, and the interrater reliability for 2.4 raters was estimated to be .72 using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula.

Control variables. Consistent with prior research (e.g., Rior- dan, Griffith, & Weatherly, 2003; Schaubroeck, Lam, & Cha, 2007), employees’ age, gender, and education level were included as control variables. Moreover, when testing each hypothesis, the nonfocal personality traits were included as controls in efforts to capture the unique contribution of each trait.

Analytical strategy. Given the nested nature of data (i.e., employees in the same work group shared the same direct super- visor), we tested all hypotheses with Mplus version 7.4 (Muthén & Muthén, 2015) using maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors; this approach allows outcome intercepts to ran- domly vary across groups and thus enabled us to account for

potential dependence in data (Hofmann, 1997). Moreover, we used Monte Carlo bootstrapping (Selig & Preacher, 2008) to calculate the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for both the conditional indirect effects and the difference between the conditional indirect effects.2

Results

Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations among vari- ables can be found in Table 1. Complete moderated mediation analysis results are reported in Tables 2, 3, and 4. Hypothesis 1 posited the moderated mediation (conditional indirect) effect of conscientiousness on performance. As shown in Table 2, the moderating effect of transformation leadership on the relationship between conscientiousness and perceived meaningfulness at work was negative and significant and the interaction pattern, as shown in Figure 2, was consistent with Hypothesis 1. The simple slope at 1 standard deviation (SD) below the mean of transformation lead- ership (simple slope � .22, t � 2.48, p � .05) was significantly more positive than the simple slope at 1 SD above the mean of transformational leadership (simple slope � .04, t � .54, p � .59). Given the support for this moderating effect, we tested for moderated mediation. As shown in the lower part of Table 2, the conditional indirect effect was more positive at low (effectlow(�1SD) � .037, CI95% � [.008, .071]), rather than high (effecthigh(�1SD) � .006, CI95% � [�.017, .030]) levels of transformation leadership and the difference (diff � .030, CI95% � [.002, .063]) of the two conditional indirect effects was significant. Thus, Hypothesis 1 was supported.

As can be seen in Table 3, results indicate that the Extraversion � TFL interaction term was not significantly related to perceived mean- ingfulness. Moreover, while the effect of extraversion on performance through perceived meaningfulness at low levels of transformational leadership was significant (effectlow(�1SD) � .027, CI95% � [.003,

2 We computed ICC1 values of all study variables to estimate their magnitude of dependence. The results show that group membership only accounted for less than 2% of variance in conscientiousness (ICC1 � .002), extraversion (ICC1 � .012), openness to experience (ICC1 � .002), perceived meaningfulness (ICC1 � .016), and transformational leadership (ICC1 � .005) but explained 11.8% in job performance (ICC1 � .118). The ICC1 values of the previous five variables were low but the value of job performance was relatively high (Bliese, 2000; LeBreton & Senter, 2008).

Table 1 Means, Standard Deviations, and Zero-Order Correlations

Variable M SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1. Gender .42 .49 — 2. Age 1.64 .74 .37 — 3. Education 2.49 .80 .17 .24 — 4. Conscientiousness 3.18 .50 �.03 �.04 �.01 (.81) 5. Extraversion 3.28 .55 .02 .03 .01 .43 (.73) 6. Openness to experience 3.19 .47 .06 �.03 �.01 .46 .21 (.76) 7. Transformational leadership 3.02 .71 �.03 �.09 �.04 .21 .15 .11 (.94) 8. Perceived meaningfulness 3.38 .60 .02 �.00 .04 .29 .23 .31 .32 (.81) 9. Job performance 3.16 .42 �.02 �.03 .01 .41 .27 .30 .37 .36 (.72)

Note. N � 496 salespeople representing 91 supervisory units. Gender was dummy coded (female � 0, male � 1). Age was measured on a 4-point scale (where 1 � 20–29 years of age, 2 � 30–39 years of age, 3 � 40–49 years of age, and 4 � 50 years of age or greater). Education was measured on a 5-point scale (where 1 � high school, 2 � junior college, 3 � Bachelor’s degree, 4 � Master’s degree, 5 � PhD). Reliability estimates appear in parentheses across the diagonal. If r is equal to or greater than |.09|, its 95% confidence interval does not include zero (i.e., p � .05 [two-tailed]).

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328 FRIEDER, WANG, AND OH

.059]), the difference between the conditional indirect effects was not significant (diff � .019, CI95% � [�.010, .053]). Therefore, we did not find support for Hypothesis 2.

Finally, Table 4 shows that the moderating effect of transfor- mation leadership on the relationship between openness and per- ceived meaningfulness was negative and significant; the interac- tion pattern, as shown in Figure 3, was consistent with Hypothesis 3. The simple slope at 1 SD below the mean of transformation leadership (simple slope � .37, t � 4.42, p � .05) was found to be significantly more positive than the simple slope at 1 SD above the mean of transformational leadership (simple slope � .18, t � 2.41, p � .05). Given these findings, we estimated and compared the conditional indirect effects. As shown in the lower part of Table 4, the conditional indirect effect was more positive at low (effectlow(�1SD) � .062, CI95% � [.023, .106]), rather than high (effecthigh(�1SD) � .031, CI95% � [.005, .065]) levels of transformation leadership and the difference (diff � .032, CI95% � [.002, .067]) of the two conditional indirect effects was significant. Thus, the results supported Hypothe- sis 3.

Discussion

By integrating fundamental premises of TPWB (Barrick et al., 2013) with CAPS theory (Mischel & Shoda, 1995), this study set out to examine the manner by which followers’ job-relevant per- sonality traits (i.e., conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience) and perceptions of transformational leadership jointly

influence job performance via perceptions of meaningfulness at work. Based on data from 496 outdoor sales employees and their 218 direct supervisors and regional managers, we found support for the differences in the conditional indirect effects of conscien- tiousness and openness to experience, but not for extraversion.

Theoretical Implications

This study contributes to theory and research in various ways. First, we contribute to an emerging stream of research on follow- ership. Our findings support the importance of the repeated calls from prominent leadership scholars (e.g., Shamir, 2007; Uhl-Bien et al., 2014) to “reverse the lens” to focus on followers’ role in attaining desirable work outcomes. Furthermore, our research shows the importance of taking balanced views by not solely focusing on followers’ role in the leadership processes. The results suggest that transformational leadership perceptions are particu- larly effective in enhancing less conscientious or open-minded salespeople’s perceived meaningfulness, which makes a signifi- cant difference between more and less conscientious (or open- minded) salespeople’s performance. Taken together, this study complements leader-centric contingency models (e.g., Fiedler, 1967) in the leadership literature and supports the accepted wis- dom that “there is no leadership without followers” (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014. p. 83).

Second, this research provides initial evidence regarding the validity of TPWB. Our results largely provided support for the

Table 2 Mixed-Effect Modeling Results: Moderated Mediation Analyses Testing Hypothesis 1

Predictors

Mediator � Meaningfulness DV � Performance

B SEB B SEB

Intercept .98� .24 1.42� .18 Gender �.00 .05 �.01 .04 Age .02 .03 �.01 .02 Education .04 .03 .01 .02 Extraversion .10� .05 .07 .04 Openness to experience .26� .07 .08� .04 Conscientiousness .13� .07 .22� .04 Transformational leadership .24� .03 — — CO � TFL �.13� .06 — — Perceived meaningfulness — — .17� .04

Direct, indirect, and total effects Effect LL UL

Direct effect of CO on performance .217� [.142 .292] Conditional indirect effect of CO on performance at:

Low TFL (�1 SD) .037� [.008 .071] High TFL (�1 SD) .006 [�.017 .030] Difference .030� [.002 .063]

Conditional total effect at: Low TFL (�1 SD) .254� [.176 .331] High TFL (�1 SD) .223� [.146 .300]

Note. N � 496. Gender was dummy coded (female � 0, male � 1). CO � conscientiousness; TFL � transformational leadership. Intercepts were allowed to vary across supervisory units. All variables are measured at the individual follower level (Level 1) of analysis. The 95% confidence intervals for the conditional indirect effects, the difference in the conditional indirect effects, and the conditional total effects were calculated using Monte Carlo bootstrapping with 100,000 repetitions. DV � dependent variable; LL � lower limit; UL � upper limit. � The 95% bias corrected bootstrapped confidence interval does not include zero; p � .05 (two-tailed).

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329PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP

core tenets of TPWB (Barrick et al., 2013). Specifically, our results support the notion that person–job congruent work situa- tions are perceived to be meaningful because individuals’ person- ality traits are compatible with the inherent job requirements (Pervin, 1989). Accordingly, this study emphasizes the importance of matching personality traits to job requirements (e.g., putting the right people in the right place) as an effective way to enhance perceptions of meaningfulness at work and ultimately perfor- mance.

Moreover, this study also enriches TPWB by linking its discus- sion on congruent versus incongruent job environments to the moderating role of social contexts. Barrick et al. (2013) described discordant work situations as those situations in which individuals’ personalities are not compatible with the inherent job characteris- tics of the situation. Extending TPWB, we found that a social characteristic of the work environment, transformational leader- ship, can increase perceived meaningfulness even when one’s work seems to be discordant with one’s innate goal strivings. This speaks to the power of transformational leaders in motivating employees to perform even when such employees’ personality traits are not compatible with their jobs.

Third, this study contributes to the transformational leadership literature by revealing the broad impact of transformational lead- ership. In addition to evidence regarding its direct and positive effects on follower motivation and behaviors (e.g., Judge & Pic- colo, 2004), consistent with TPWB and CAPS theory (Mischel & Shoda, 1995), transformational leadership also moderates the un- derlying process by which job-relevant personality traits influence

job performance. Consistent with CAPS theory, our findings suggest that perceptions of transformational leadership can serve as strong situations that weaken the relationships of traits with meaningfulness perceptions (directly) and work behaviors (indirectly).

Practical Implications

Consistent with evidence in personnel selection (Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001), selecting on conscientiousness, extraversion, and open- ness to experience appears to be effective for outdoor sales personnel. Accordingly, organizations should continue to design recruitment and selection procedures that emphasize such requisite job requirements and screen out individuals based on job-relevant personality traits. However, for employees who have secured employment opportunities for which their personalities are not well-suited (e.g., tight labor market conditions, false positives), leaders can help them to perceive their work as meaningful by displaying transformational leadership. Optimistically, this implies that all is not lost for employees lacking these instrumental traits, because leaders can be trained to display transformational leadership behaviors (Mason, Griffin, & Parker, 2014).

Moreover, the results also suggest that transformational lead- ership is always beneficial for organizations to increase em- ployee motivation and performance. Supervisors can strategi- cally use transformational leadership behaviors to facilitate purposeful work behavior especially toward salespeople who lack job-relevant traits. For instance, for less open-minded

Table 3 Mixed-Effect Modeling Results: Moderated Mediation Analyses Testing Hypothesis 2

Predictors

Mediator � Meaningfulness DV � Performance

B SEB B SEB

Intercept .97� .24 1.42� .18 Gender .00 .06 �.01 .04 Age .02 .03 �.01 .02 Education .04 .03 .01 .02 Conscientiousness .11 .06 .22� .04 Openness to experience .28� .07 .08� .04 Extraversion .11� .05 .07 .04 Transformational leadership .23� .03 — — EX � TFL �.08 .06 — — Perceived meaningfulness — — .17� .04

Direct, indirect, and total effects Effect LL UL

Direct effect of EX on performance .068 [�.001 .137] Conditional indirect effect of EX on performance at:

Low TFL (�1 SD) .027� [.003 .059] High TFL (�1 SD) .009 [�.017 .030] Difference .019 [�.010 .053]

Conditional total effect at: Low TFL (�1 SD) .095� [.025 .166] High TFL (�1 SD) .077� [.005 .148]

Note. N � 496. Gender was dummy coded (female � 0, male � 1). EX � Extraversion; TFL � transfor- mational leadership. Intercepts were allowed to vary across supervisory units. All variables are measured at the individual follower level (Level 1) of analysis. The 95% confidence intervals for the conditional indirect effects, the difference in the conditional indirect effects, and the conditional total effects were calculated using Monte Carlo bootstrapping with 100,000 repetitions. DV � dependent variable; LL � lower limit; UL � upper limit. � The 95% bias corrected bootstrapped confidence interval does not include zero; p � .05 (two-tailed).

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330 FRIEDER, WANG, AND OH

salespeople, transformational leaders may evoke heightened perceptions of meaningfulness and ultimately performance by encouraging those employees to challenge the status quo, take initiative, experiment with new ideas, adopt new strategies or sales methods, and tolerate failure. More generally, we recom- mend transformational leaders facilitate their followers’ pursuit of achievement-, status-, and autonomy-striving initiatives by

recognizing, supporting, and rewarding such goal-striving be- haviors. For example, leaders may assign more clients or lar- ger territories to highly conscientious salespeople and, thus, give them opportunities to attain these more challenging achievement-striving goals with proper mentoring. Notably, this suggestion is mainly based on the assumptions of our theoretical model rather than our empirical findings.

Table 4 Mixed-Effect Modeling Results: Moderated Mediation Analyses Testing Hypothesis 3

Predictors

Mediator � Meaningfulness DV � Performance

B SEB B SEB

Intercept .99� .24 1.42� .18 Gender .00 .06 �.01 .04 Age .02 .03 �.01 .02 Education .04 .03 .01 .02 Conscientiousness .11 .07 .22� .04 Extraversion .11� .05 .07 .04 Openness to experience .28� .07 .08� .04 Transformational leadership .23� .03 — — OPEN � TFL �.13� .07 — — Perceived meaningfulness — — .17� .04

Direct, indirect, and total effects Effect LL UL

Direct effect of OPEN on performance .084� [.010 .158] Conditional indirect effect of OPEN on performance at:

Low TFL (� 1 SD) .062� [.023 .106] High TFL (� 1 SD) .031� [.005 .065] Difference .032� [.002 .067]

Conditional total effect at: Low TFL (� 1 SD) .146� [.060 .234] High TFL (� 1 SD) .115� [.036 .194]

Note. N � 496. Gender was dummy coded (female � 0, male � 1). OPEN � Openness to Experience; TFL � transformational leadership. Intercepts were allowed to vary across supervisory units. All variables are measured at the individual follower level (Llevel 1) of analysis. The 95% confidence intervals for the conditional indirect effects, the difference in the conditional indirect effects, and the conditional total effects were calculated using Monte Carlo bootstrapping with 100,000 repetitions. DV � dependent variable; LL � lower limit; UL � upper limit. � The 95% bias corrected bootstrapped confidence interval does not include zero; p � .05 (two-tailed).

Low CO High CO

ssenlufgninae M deviecreP

Low TFL*

High TFL

High

Low

Figure 2. Interactive effect of conscientiousness and transformational leadership on perceived meaningfulness at work. CO � conscientiousness; TFL � transformational leadership. � p � .05 (two-tailed).

Low OPEN High OPEN

ssenlufgninae M deviecreP

Low TFL*

High TFL*

High

Low

Figure 3. Interactive effect of openness to experience and transforma- tional leadership on perceived meaningfulness at work. OPEN � openness to experience; TFL � transformational leadership. � p � .05 (two-tailed).

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331PERSONALITY AND LEADERSHIP

Study Limitations and Directions for Future Research

This study has several noteworthy limitations. First, we mea- sured employee personality with the widely used IPIP scale, which may fall short of capturing the ambition facet of extraversion (Hogan, 1995) that has been shown to be particularly important for sales performance (Vinchur et al., 1998). This may explain the lack of support for the conditional indirect of extraversion on perfor- mance via perceived meaningfulness. Thus, we encourage future research to use scales that also measure the ambition facet of extraversion such as the Hogan Personality Inventory (Hogan, 1995) when studying salespeople’s personality traits. Second, we measured transformational leadership based on followers’ percep- tions, which are vulnerable to followers’ perceptual biases (e.g., Bono, Hooper, & Yoon, 2012). Thus, it would be interesting to compare our results to studies in which transformational leadership is measured by other raters. Third, we measured job-relevant personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness) rather than implicit goal strivings (e.g., achievement striving). However, individuals may not even be aware of their higher-order implicit goal strivings (Barrick et al., 2013; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010); therefore, we felt it was appropriate to operationalize our constructs in this manner. Nevertheless, researchers may want to measure the implicit goal strivings to further examine TPWB.

In conclusion, our research shows the importance of integrating personality and leadership research, supports the core tenet of TPWB, suggests that followers are not interchangeable, and that both followers and leaders are integral parts of the leadership process that may interactively affect work outcomes.

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Received September 17, 2016 Revision received July 28, 2017

Accepted September 9, 2017 �

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