The Importance of Being Humble: A Meta-Analysis and Incremental Validity Analysis of the Relationship Between Honesty-Humility and Job Performance

Abstract

© 2019 American Psychological Association. The HEXACO model presents a conceptualization of personality that includes the trait honesty-humility (H-H) in addition to 5 other personality traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotionality, extraversion, openness) that closely approximate the ubiquitous five-factor model (FFM) of personality. A substantial literature has accumulated supporting the structure of the HEXACO model and the construct validity of the H-H trait in particular. A newer development is the appearance of H-H in the applied psychology literature. This begs the question of whether H-H exhibits significant criterion-related validity with respect to job performance and whether H-H accounts for incremental validity over other established individual differences predictors of job performance. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship between H-H and 3 major dimensions of job performance (counterproductive work behavior [CWB], organizational citizenship behavior [OCB], and task performance) and compare the incremental validity of H-H with other established individual differences predictors (general mental ability, the FFM, and integrity tests). Our results indicate that H-H correlates -.44 with CWB, .13 with OCB, and .15 with task performance (each correlation corrected for unreliability in both the independent and dependent variables). Further, H-H demonstrated incremental validity over the other individual differences predictors in the case of CWB but not OCB and task performance.