Does Conscientiousness Explain the Relationship Between Integrity and Job Performance?

There is a meta‐analytic evidence that scores on integrity tests are related to measures of overall job performance, but it is not clear why this relationship exists. One hypothesis that would account for this correlation is that both integrity and performance measures are related to the personality trait conscientiousness, and that statistically controlling for conscientiousness would substantially reduce the integrity‐performance correlation. To test this hypothesis, we used the results of three meta‐analyses to estimate the components needed to calculate the partial correlation between integrity and performance, controlling for conscientiousness. Partialling had little effect; the best estimate of the corrected zero‐order and partial correlations between integrity and performance were 0.34 and 0.28, respectively. Sensitivity analyses suggest that imprecision in the estimates of the various components of this partial correlation cannot reasonably explain the small effects of partialling.