How to maximise "total employee lifetime value"
2 minutes
New research explains the link between neuroticism and attrition. Find out how to increase the "lifetime value" of your employees by ensuring they don't leave too early.
When it comes to predicting job performance, personality plays second fiddle to cognitive ability. The correlations are modest, and if you've ever heard someone dismiss personality assessments on those grounds, they're not entirely wrong.
But what gets overlooked is that personality is a considerably stronger predictor of something most hiring teams care about just as much... who actually stays.
Research shows neurotic employees are eight times more likely to leave
There's one piece of research that makes the case pretty clearly. Oh et al. (2024) looked at the relationship between job performance, retention, and emotional stability, and found that high performers who score low on emotional stability are approximately eight times more likely to leave than equally high-performing colleagues who score well on it.
High performance in demanding roles comes with pressure, and for someone who handles pressure well, that's manageable. For someone who doesn't, the same conditions become a grind.
They're delivering the results, but they're burning through reserves to do it.
And the research found something that makes this even more interesting: neurotic high performers were about four times more likely to quit than equally neurotic average performers. In other words, low emotional stability hits hardest precisely when the performance bar is highest. Average performers with the same trait showed attrition rates broadly comparable to emotionally stable employees.
It also goes the other way. For low performers, attrition is already high across the board, but for neurotic low performers it roughly doubles, with the probability of leaving exceeding 50%. That's the highest in the study. So across the performance spectrum, emotional stability is quietly doing a lot of work.
Conscientiousness matters too. It's the trait most consistently linked to job satisfaction and lower turnover intention across the research. People who score highly tend to find purpose in doing their work well, and that makes leaving a lot less likely.
Total employee lifetime value
We don't really care too much if we end up losing the poor performers. But what we do care about, is when the high performers leave.
Think about the high performer who leaves after eighteen months. They delivered, built relationships, understood the business, and then left just as they were starting to pay back the investment you'd made in them. And because they were good, they've gone to a competitor.
The right way to think about this is performance multiplied by tenure. A capable person who stays three years contributes far more than an equally capable person who leaves after one.
Conclusion and next steps
Personality is a big factor in whether someone stays or leaves early. Emotional stability and conscientiousness come up repeatedly in the research, and recent studies show neuroticism can make you 8x more likely to leave.
Neuroticism, conscientiousness, emotional stability... these are all things that are measured directly in personality assessments.
Primary author
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
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