There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than DGF

In their article, Ree, Carretta, and Teachout (2015) argued that a dominant general factor (DGF) is present in most, if not all, psychological measures (e.g., personality, leadership, attitudes, skills). A DGF, according to Ree et al., is identified by two characteristics. First, the DGF accounts for the largest amount of a measure's systematic variance, and second, it influences every subdimension within the construct domain. They indicate that researchers ignore DGFs and pay inappropriate amounts of attention to the specific dimensions (DSs) even though the DGF provides most of the predictive power and the DS adds little predictive power.