PREDICTING CONFLICT STRATEGY WITH PERSONALITY TRAITS: INCREMENTAL VALIDITY AND THE FIVE FACTOR MODEL

Research examining the relation of personality to conflict resolution strategy has yet to incorporate the dominant, contemporary view of personality, the five‐factor model (FFM). The use of broad traits (domains), to represent personality, although parsimonious, ignores information contained in narrow personality facets, masks important conceptual relations with various strategies, and has produced inconsistent results. The present study demonstrates that narrow, rather than broad, FFM traits consistently explain greater variance in strategy, and account for significant variance when FFM domain scores appear unrelated to the criterion. These effects are shown to result from the unbinding of criterion‐related from criterion‐unrelated facet scores that are otherwise aggregated into broad domains.