The dark side of conscientiousness: Conscientious people experience greater drops in life satisfaction following unemployment

Abstract

Conscientious individuals tend to achieve more and have higher well-being. This has led to a view that conscientiousness is always positive for well-being. We hypothesize that conscientiousness could be detrimental to well-being when failure is experienced, such as when individuals become unemployed. In a 4-year longitudinal study of 9570 individuals interviewed yearly we show that the drop in an individual’s life satisfaction following unemployment is significantly moderated by their conscientiousness. After 3 years of unemployment individuals high in conscientiousness (i.e. one standard deviation above the mean) experience a 120% higher decrease in life satisfaction than those at low levels. Thus the positive relationship typically seen between conscientiousness and well-being is reversed: conscientiousness is therefore not always good for well-being.

Introduction

Conscientiousness is positively associated with well-being (DeNeve and Cooper, 1998, Steel et al., 2008). Conscientious individuals appear to be orientated towards life situations that are beneficial for well-being (Mccrae & Costa, 1991), set themselves higher goals (Barrick et al., 1993, DeNeve and Cooper, 1998), and have high levels of motivation (Judge & Ilies, 2002). Conscientious individuals are therefore more likely to achieve highly (McGregor & Little, 1998) and obtain higher well-being (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998). Overall, this body of literature has lead conscientiousness to be conceptualized as a positive, adaptive personality trait that is important for well-being, employment, and personal functioning (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998).

Although conscientiousness is generally positively related to well-being and functioning, with a correlation between 0.2 and 0.3 (Steel et al., 2008); there may be situations where this pattern is reversed, and where high conscientiousness poses a risk for well-being and productivity. These situations have not previously been studied, leading to a perhaps erroneous view that being more conscientious is always better. Given the strong links between conscientiousness and goal setting, motivation, and achievement, we hypothesize that under conditions of failure conscientious people may experience sharper decreases in well-being. We use a nationally representative dataset of 9570 people to investigate the role that conscientiousness has on well-being following a life event that represents a severe and chronic failure. Specifically, we examine how prospectively measured conscientiousness may interact with unemployment to affect well-being.

Unemployment is ever present in our societies. For example, during 2009 there were on average 14.3 million unemployed individuals in the United States representing an unemployment rate of 9.3%; a rate not seen since 1983.¹ Many individuals face the prospect of unemployment at some point in their lives and the experience can be devastating. The loss of work generally represents a failure in life and can be extremely harmful to well-being (e.g. Frey & Stutzer, 2002). In addition to the loss of earnings, unemployment represents a loss of purpose and can erode an individual’s identity and sense of self-worth (Turner, 1995). It is not simply the case that less happier people are selected into unemployment (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999), and a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies shows that unemployment has an average causal effect size of .38 on mental health (McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, & Kinicki, 2005). Additionally, it can be difficult to recover psychologically from unemployment (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2004).

Although conscientious people may potentially experience greater distress following failure, there are additional reasons that suggest conscientious individuals could experience greater distress from unemployment. First, evidence suggests that conscientious people tend to accumulate more wealth (Ameriks, Caplin, & Leahy, 2003) and obtain more well-being from income increases (Boyce & Wood, submitted for publication). To the extent that accumulating wealth might be a goal of conscientious people, unemployment might represent a chronic blocking of an important goal, which can lead to decreased well-being (Emmons, 1992). Second, employment may be more important to conscientious people, offering opportunities for conscientious people to use their particular strengths (cf. Barrick et al., 1993, DeNeve and Cooper, 1998). Both the increased importance of employment and the use of strengths have been related to well-being (McKee-Ryan et al., 2005, Seligman et al., 2005), and becoming unemployed would remove the opportunities for conscientious people to gain emotional benefits in this way. Third, being conscientious may lead to different appraisals of the reasons for unemployment. Specifically, un-conscientious people might attribute unemployment to a lack of effort whilst working in their previous job (a temporary and specific cause for failure). Contrastingly, conscientious people who worked to their ability would not be able interpret the situation in this way, and may attribute their failure to their own lack of ability (a stable and general cause of failure). This attribution style has been related to clinical depression (Alloy et al., 2006, Mongrain and Blackburn, 2005), anxiety (Ralph & Mineka, 1998), and negative affect (Sanjuan, Perez, Rueda, & Ruiz, 2008).

As conscientious people seem theoretically more likely to (a) experience distress from failure, (b) have accumulating wealth as a goal, (c) value their workplace more, and (d) appraise unemployment differently, we hypothesize that conscientious people would experience greater distress from unemployment. It is not the purpose of this study to examine which of these mechanisms is responsible for the effect, but rather to demonstrate that the usually observed positive relationship between conscientiousness and well-being can sometimes be reversed. In doing so, we aim to encourage a broader study of conscientiousness, one that considers the situations in which conscientiousness is adaptive and when conscientiousness poses a risk to well-being. Additionally, this will provide the first study to suggest that the effects of unemployment on well-being depend on any personality characteristic. This observation may have applied implications for the support given to people post-employment.