Social, Emotional, and Behavioral (SEB) Skills in the Workplace

The current study sought to extend Soto et al. (2022)‘s results on social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills to a work setting and answer three key questions. First, do SEB skills predict consequential work-related outcomes? Second, do SEB skills provide incremental validity over the Big Five personality traits in predicting the outcomes? Third, is the joint effect of SEB skills and traits additive or multiplicative? Results from a sample of real estate agents (N = 2,992) in China extend the criterion space of SEB skills by showing self-concepts of these skills are related to self-reported work outcomes such as citizenship behaviors and job satisfaction in a conceptually meaningful way. Further analyses show that these skill-outcome relationships remain robust after accounting for effects of traits, indicating SEB skills’ incremental validity beyond traits in predicting outcomes. Finally, comparisons between additive and multiplicative models show support for the former because the interaction effects of SEB skills and traits provide little meaningful information beyond the additive models. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications for the SEB skills literature and practice.