Revisiting the Inhibitory Effect of General Mental Ability on Counterproductive Work Behavior: The Case for GMA-Personality Interaction

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is an important component of job performance that is known to be related to critical personal and organizational consequences. Thus, both researchers and practitioners are interested in better understanding CWB’s primary drivers. Despite its popularity, the theoretical inhibitory effect of GMA on CWB, which predicts that employees with higher GMA will show lower CWB, has seen weak and inconsistent empirical support. Here, we propose that a reason for this divide between theory and empirical studies can be explained by a more appropriate interpretation of the inhibitory effect as conditional, in that the strength of the GMA-CWB relationship is dependent on other critical individual differences. We suggest that the meta-trait stability–which subsumes conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability, the three personality traits shown to be consistently positively related to CWB–is critical for revealing the GMA-CWB relation in empirical studies. Specifically, we hypothesize that the inhibitory effect is dependent on the meta-trait stability such that the expected negative GMA-CWB relationship is strongest for those with low levels of stability but is not apparent for those with high levels of stability. Results supported the conditional inhibitory hypothesis across two large samples. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.