The CAPS Model Suggests Removing Broad Personality Factors From Explanations of Personality-Workplace Relationships: Comment on Zimmerman, Swider, Woo, & Allen (2016)

This comment was originally developed as a response to Zimmerman, Swider, Woo, and Allen’s 2016 article “Who withdraws? Psychological individual differences and employee withdrawal behaviors,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Zimmerman et al. proposed how the Cognitive Affective Personality System, or CAPS model, could help understand how the effects of Five Factor traits on withdrawal behaviors are mediated by psychological processes. However, the CAPS model was developed with a forceful rejection of the notion that such units serve as distal or ‘basic’ causes of individual differences in behavior. Our comment details how downgrading the prominence of such factors in line with CAPS theory can better advance our understanding of the psychological processes underlying variation in workplace behaviors. This comment has been slightly revised from the original submitted to JAP in 2016, particularly to provide discussion of more recent research.