Personality traits are widely used in organizational psychology as a lens to understand the person and to make predictions about work-related outcomes. The trait approach relies on individuals' typical behavioral tendencies and ignores behavioral variation across contexts and situations. The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a multifocal personality framework that enhances the understanding of the person as a whole and increases precision in prediction. The framework proposes that three foci consist of a person's personality system, ranging from the most general level, to the moderate contextualized trait level, to the most specific task/state level. The personality framework is applied in the training context to propose hypotheses about using contextualized and specific traits to predict learning and transfer above and beyond global traits and to implement an intervention to enhance learning and transfer. Results suggest that the personality-based intervention interacts with trainee characteristics to affect learning. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
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