Cognitive Reflection, Life Satisfaction, Emotional Balance and Job Performance

The validity of individual difference variables for predicting important life phenomena, such as job performance, has been studied for over a century. However, the relationships between some of them have scarcely been investigated. This paper presents a study on the relationship between cognitive reflection (CR), satisfaction with life (SWL), and emotional balance (EB) with job performance. The participants were 245 managers (140 men and 105 women) working in companies in various economic sectors. The results showed that CR was not significantly related to job performance but that SWL and EB were valid predictors. Moreover, CR correlated significantly with SWL and EB. Multiple regression analysis showed that neither CR nor EB showed incremental validity over SWL in predicting job performance. These findings suggest that CR may not be an important variable in the workplace, at least regarding job performance, and that it is not a fully cognitive construct because some degree of its variance may be shared with motivational and personality traits.