Work values and personality traits as predictors of enterprising and social vocational interests

The present study investigated the incremental validity of work values to predict enterprising and social vocational interests over and above personality traits in a sample of 178 undergraduate commercial engineering or commercial sciences seniors. Twelve work values, defined as broad tendencies to prefer general job characteristics, were operationalized as the extent to which people assign importance to a range of job characteristics when thinking about an ideal work situation. Personality traits were assessed with the Dutch authorized adaptation of the NEO-PI-R (Costa McCrae, 1992; Hoekstra et al., 1996). Enterprising and Social vocational interests were assessed with three-item scales representing job titles. Although, the majority of the work values were related to the Five Factor Model-traits, correlations were modest to moderate, not exceeding 0.44. The results of the stepwise hierarchical multiple regression analyses show that work values have incremental validity over and above the FFM-traits to predict enterprising and social vocational interests. Enterprising interests are predicted by Extraversion, whereas Social interests are predicted by Openness. The work values Influence and Team respectively further add positively and negatively to the prediction of Enterprising vocational preferences, while interest in Social occupations is additionally characterized by putting less weight on Earnings. The discussion focuses on the validity of work values and personality traits for vocational and career streaming. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.