Success at Work Depends on Your Partner's Personality |
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In romantic relationships, the effect of partner's personalities are not isolated to the partner's life.
Aspects of people's daily lives can be predicted by their partner's traits, including their work success.
Research shows that partners' conscientiousness predicts job satisfaction, income, and promotion likelihood.
Conscientiousness is tied to household work and relationship satisfaction, which may facilitate work success.
When we think about professional success, we're quick to link it to our own strengths. Get a raise? It's because of your work ethic! Land a new title? You earned it!
All of this may be true, but there's more to the story. Research suggests that people's professional successes are not purely the outcome of their own work. In the background, their romantic partner's personality may be setting them up for success (Solomon and Jackson, 2014).
Personality Extends Beyond a Person
Personality researchers often rely on the Big Five traits to help define and differentiate tendencies within and across people. The five traits include extraversion (outgoing, gregariousness), agreeableness, openness, neuroticism (anxious, low on emotional stability), and conscientiousness. If you know where someone falls on these five dimensions of personality, you probably have a pretty good sense of their emotional and behavioral tendencies.
Personality doesn't end with the person. It bleeds into the life and experiences of people close to them, including their romantic partner. Think about a typical evening at home, when both partners are together. If one partner's neuroticism is spiking, the other partner knows it, feels it, and isn't having their best evening either. And if one partner is showing their agreeableness? The other partner may feel like life is easier and more pleasant.
The immediate impact of a partner's personality on another partner's life makes sense, given that emotions and behaviors are linked to personality dimensions. But what if a partner isn't there? How far does the potential impact of a partner's personality extend?
Personality at Home and Job Success at Work
If a romantic partner never sets foot in a person's workplace, could they still shape a person's work experiences? Yes. Partners may be nowhere near each other, but they are affecting each other's work success.
Using five waves of data collected as part of a larger survey from an Australian nationally representative sample, researchers looked at the responses of about 4500 participants and examined whether couples' personality traits predicted key markers of job success (Solomon and Jackson, 2014). This study had a longitudinal design: earlier reports of personality were used to predict later job satisfaction, income, and promotions.
Findings suggested, unsurprisingly, that individuals' own personality traits predicted aspects of their job performance. For instance, individuals' own extraversion predicted their subsequent job satisfaction and their promotions; individuals' own agreeableness was inversely associated with their income, but positively linked with their job satisfaction. People higher in neuroticism tended to receive fewer promotions than those lower in neuroticism.
Next, and critically, the researchers also examined how a partner's personality predicted individuals' own job success later down the line. They uncovered the importance of partner conscientiousness, which predicted individuals' later professional success. To have a more conscientious partner predicted a greater likelihood of promotion, job satisfaction, and income. This was observed regardless of gender and was more pronounced for single-income families.
Why Relationships Matter
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Conscientiousness Partners Create a Context that Breeds Success
Conscientious people tend to follow rules and work hard; they have good other-awareness and assume responsibility for the well-being of others. On account of this definition, might the link between a partner's conscientiousness and one's own job success be tied to certain behaviors or aspects of interdependence?
Included in Solomon and Jackson's (2014) study was an assessment of how much people outsourced household labor (doing the dishes, home repairs) to their partners. In addition, the researchers had access to information suggesting how much time partners spent together (how much opportunity they had to influence each other) and their relationship satisfaction.
What they discovered is that conscientious partners elevated their partners' work performance by taking on more household chores and by subtly influencing their partners to emulate their own conscientiousness. Lastly, conscientious partners set the stage for their partner's success by their tendency toward relationship satisfaction. Fewer problems at home mean more mental resources at work.
The Benefits of Conscientiousness in Relationships
Having a highly conscientious partner predicted better professional outcomes regardless of gender, and independent of individuals' own conscientiousness (Solomon and Jackson, 2014). As noted above, partners who spend time together emulate each other: this suggests that one highly conscientious partner could support the other, whose own growing conscientiousness could benefit the other, and so forth and so on.
There is potential for a self-propagating healthy pattern that supports both the home front and individuals' work lives.
Solomon, B. C., & Jackson, J. J. (2014). The long reach of one’s spouse: Spouses’ personality influences occupational success. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2189-2198.