Psychological Bulletin, Vol 152(5-6), May-Jun 2026, 509-543; doi:10.1037/bul0000526
Recent research in personality science has highlighted influences of life experiences on personality trait development. Yet, the line of inquiry on how work experiences shape personality development has generally yielded mixed findings. Furthermore, prior work has yet to more systematically examine the role of time in shaping the influences of work experiences, to more appropriately tease apart within- and between-person effects, and to simultaneously model both the selection effect of personality and the socialization effect of work experiences at the within-person level. We conducted a preregistered continuous time meta-analysis of longitudinal studies (k = 11 large-scale archival studies, N ≈ 134,515) to investigate how income—one crucial form of work experience reflecting how people successfully fulfill work responsibilities to achieve high social status—influences employees’ development of the Big Five personality traits at the within-person level. We simultaneously examined the selection effect of personality. We found, on average, positive lagged influences of income on subsequent changes of emotional stability and conscientiousness, and the influence on extraversion was generally negative. The lagged influences of conscientiousness and emotional stability on subsequent income changes were generally positive, and the influence was negative for extraversion, suggesting reciprocal relationships. The magnitude of the influences varied over time in an inverted U-shaped fashion with certain levels of between-study heterogeneity. As a more stringent test of the social investment and corresponsive principles, the findings provide more support to the Neo-Socioanalytic Model than the Five Factor Model. Our research showcases the importance of greater cross-fertilization among different areas of psychology for advancing research on personality development in the workplace. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)