Personality in Situations: Going Beyond the OCEAN and Introducing the Situation Five

We present the psychometric evaluation of a personality measure that assesses the Big Five and situation perception based on a newly developed taxonomy of situation characteristics. Following the lexical approach, more than 15,000 adjectives were extracted from an authoritative German dictionary. In a first exploratory study, 521 participants rated every-day situations on 300 adjectives selected as potential situation descriptors. Seven dimensions of situation perception were initially extracted. In a second study with N = 387, five of these seven factors were confirmed: Outcome-Expectancy, Briskness, Cognitive Load, Psychological and Physical Load, and Lack of Stimuli, together referred to as the Situation Five. Finally, a measurement tool, the Big Five of Personality in Occupational Situations (B5PS), was constructed to assess the Big Five personality traits and the Situation Five simultaneously. We present evidence for the reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and predictive validity of the B5PS test scores. Our study highlights the relevance of situation perception as a trait and discusses their applicability in diverse contexts.