Conscientiousness in HEXACO: the four sides of factor C

At a quarter past ten in the evening, Emma opens the same presentation for the fifth time. It was due on Friday. It is Tuesday.

The slides have been finished since last week. Emma keeps nudging the bullets a little to the left, changing the colour of the bars in the chart, rewriting a sentence she has already restored to its original wording twice. Her colleague James sent his version on Monday morning, with a typo in the heading, and his evenings have been free ever since.

The team would say both of them care about their work. What separates them is not who tries harder, but the way four different tendencies have stacked up in each of them, tendencies psychology bundles together under one word: conscientiousness.

Four tendencies under one name

In the six-factor model of personality described around the turn of the millennium by the Canadian psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, conscientiousness carries the letter C. It stands alongside honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience. How those six dimensions emerged from analyses of everyday language, and where they part company with the older five, is covered in a separate piece on the HEXACO model.

Inside the C sit four narrower components, and they do not move together. One person keeps an immaculate desk and puts off every demanding task. Another grinds away from morning until night and their notes look like a pile of fallen leaves.

Emma's case looks like this: perfectionism high, organisation respectable, diligence aimed entirely at polishing. James has perfectionism low, diligence somewhere in the middle, and prudence of a kind that gets a contract signed after one read-through. Both combinations read on a CV as "careful and responsible", and in practice they work nothing alike.

Self-assessment misleads here more than with other traits. If you ask yourself whether you are careful, you answer according to how much the result matters to you. But caring about the result and actual behaviour are two different things. High perfectionism paired with average diligence produces someone who goes to bed feeling like a failure, even though all they failed to do was start.

The best predictor of job performance we have

In 1991 Murray Barrick and Michael Mount worked through more than a hundred earlier studies and calculated how personality traits relate to performance at work. They took five occupational groups, from salespeople and police officers through managers to professionals and skilled trades, and three different yardsticks: supervisor ratings, hard productivity data and success in training.

One trait held up across all of it, and it was conscientiousness. The rest worked in patches. Extraversion helped where the job means dealing with people, openness mainly during training, but outside their own domain both faded out.

Why that one? The explanation turns out to be fairly mundane. A conscientious person spends more genuine time on the task, sticks to the procedure even at the moment nobody is watching, and less often does the things that eat away at work from the inside: the late submission, the missing document, the day of absence with no explanation. This is not about bursts of brilliance. It is about smaller variation, because the output wobbles less.

The link itself is no bombshell. It is a weak to moderate relationship, so conscientiousness will not explain most of the difference between two people in the same role. What is interesting is something else: it has no competition. Seven years later Frank Schmidt and John Hunter summarised decades of research on personnel selection and found that mental ability plus conscientiousness predicts performance better than any single indicator on its own.

It does not stop at work. Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin went through data from the long-running study Lewis Terman started in 1921, and of all the personality traits, childhood conscientiousness predicted longevity best. Not because of one big thing. Because of thousands of small decisions about seat belts, cigarettes, illnesses treated to the end, and risks a person never takes.

What a high C looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Rachel runs contracts at a construction firm. She sends documents the day before the deadline, not an hour after it. She leaves a meeting with minutes in which every task has a name and a date. When the team argues three months later about what was actually agreed, Rachel has it written down.

None of this looks impressive. The work of a conscientious person shows mainly in what did not happen: in the crisis meeting that never had to be called, in the material that arrived on time because somebody ordered it before the holidays, in the invoice nobody had to dispute. Praise for this comes rarely, yet the first phone call when something goes wrong always goes to the same person.

A high C is not talent and not cleverness. It means certain moves cost less energy than they do for other people: starting earlier, staying with the dull part, going back for a check. Anyone low on the trait can do the same things, it just takes more willpower and comes off less often.

School grades give the same trait away even earlier. In 2009 Arthur Poropat summarised research on personality and academic results, and conscientiousness came out as roughly as good an indicator of grades as mental ability. Exams reward regularity as much as quickness. After school, though, nobody hands out timetables any more and you have to manufacture your own deadlines.

In hiring the trait is harder to find than you would expect. An interview reveals an impression, not a habit. Almost everyone says they are reliable, and most of them mean it sincerely.

When diligence turns against you

Now the counterintuitive part. Perfectionism and putting things off often travel together, though you would expect the exact opposite. The person with the highest bar usually submits last, and over a year sometimes gets through less than the colleague who loses no sleep over detail.

The mechanism is simple. If the first version has to be good straight away, there is never a moment to start, because there is never enough time for a good version. A twenty-minute task swells into an entire afternoon. And because it will not close, it moves to tomorrow, where the next one is already waiting.

When did you last send something before you considered it finished? And what actually happened then?

The second form of this brake is called micromanagement. A manager high on organisation and sensitive to errors sees somebody else's imprecision before it has a chance to show. They rewrite emails they did not write, check the formatting of tables, send a task back with fourteen comments. The team learns fast and stops deciding for itself, because the correction is coming anyway.

The third form is the quietest. Prudence turns into an inability to risk anything: an offer not accepted because not everything could be calculated in advance, a call not made until there is a prepared answer to every objection. From outside it looks like responsibility. From inside it is fear with a good alibi.

What people with a low C are good at

James has three overlapping meetings in his calendar and hunts for his keys every morning. But when the message comes on Tuesday that the brief is changing for the third time, it costs him forty minutes of work. At that same moment Emma is throwing out a plan she spent a week tuning.

Low conscientiousness is not laziness, though that is almost always how it gets described. It tends to be a different way of working: a quick start, composure in uncertainty, and the knack of letting go of half-done work without regret. Where the brief changes before a plan can ripen, this setting wins. The same holds in fields that run on trial and error, where most attempts get thrown away anyway.

The bill arrives, naturally. Forgotten deadlines, a pile of unfinished work, a decision made in the heat of the moment and repaired two months later. Anyone low on prudence takes more risk than they themselves believe, most often with money and behind the wheel.

In a team the difference shows up immediately. A group of nothing but careful people delivers material without a single error, just two months later than it was worth delivering. A crew of pure improvisers starts first and works out halfway through that one part got done twice and nobody began the other. A pair where one watches the direction and the other the detail argues more often than either of the above, and delivers best.

More useful than asking whether your C is high enough is knowing which of the four components is holding you back. Low organisation yields to an ordinary system of reminders. Low diligence cannot be sidestepped that way, and there the only thing that helps is changing the size of the steps.

Moving in small steps

Personality does change in adulthood, only slowly and unobtrusively. Brent Roberts and colleagues have shown repeatedly that conscientiousness rises on average from the twenties onwards, as people take on commitments at work, in a relationship and in a family. Anyone who wants to speed that shift up will get further by rebuilding situations than by making resolutions.

Before you rearrange anything, it helps to see how high your conscientiousness actually sits against your other traits. Our HEXACO test has sixty questions, takes around ten minutes and shows all six factors including C. The comparison with other people is approximate, not a diagnosis.

What works in everyday practice:

• An implementation intention instead of a resolution. Peter Gollwitzer showed that the sentence "once I am back from lunch, I will open that budget" leads to action more reliably than "I really must get started on this". The decision is made in advance, so at the moment itself there is nothing left to weigh.
• A definition of done, written in advance. Two or three conditions the material has to meet, put on paper before you start making it. Once it meets them, out it goes. Nothing else helps against a twelfth version.
• Cut the friction on one single task, not on all of them. Documents prepared the night before, the file open on the desktop, the phone in the next room.
• One round of revisions and a time cap. Time is up, it leaves in whatever state it happens to be in.
• Half an hour a week over the calendar, in which a big task falls apart into the first concrete step. Not into a wish list, just that first step.

Perfectionists can use one more question, turned the other way round. Instead of "how do I make this better", ask what specifically will happen if you send it now. The answer is usually "nothing", and there is no way to get to it except by trying.

Whether anything has shifted, you can tell from the excuses you manufacture for yourself. For one week, write down every evening a single thing you pushed back and one word for why. After seven days the same word keeps repeating in that column. For some people it is "boring", for others "it is not good enough yet", and each of them leads somewhere different.

Emma handed the presentation in on Wednesday morning, in its twelfth version. Management asked for a single change: cut it in half. Nobody noticed the typo in James's heading, because everyone was looking at the numbers on the third slide.