In job ads, employers express demand for personality traits when seeking workers to perform tasks that can be completed with different behaviors (e.g., communication, problem-solving) but not when seeking workers to perform tasks involving narrowly prescribed sets of behaviors such as routine...

Drawing on a dataset of job openings posted at an online job board, the authors find that employers are less likely to offer performance-based pay when a job entails multitasking, quality control, or team work than when a worker's performance is easily measurable. This finding is consistent with...