This still needs to be demonstrated. Although personality traits characterize individuals, attending physicians do not function as individuals only they work in teams within departments, delivering specialized patient care and medical training. The clinical specialty establishes a specific professional context, not only for the nature of patient care that varies across specialties, but also for interpersonal behaviors towards and interactions with patients. In addition, teaching performance of attending physicians is differently evaluated across specialties. What works for one specialty, does not necessarily work for another specialty. This is in line with Nettle’s cost-benefit trade-off model, which states that costs and benefits of personality traits depend on the context in which they are expressed. Subsequently, a certain personality trait could be beneficial for the teaching of residents within one specialty, but could come with costs within another specialty. Still, specialty dependent effects of personality on teaching performance of attending physicians are unexplored. Overall, since previous research suggests that personality traits could affect teaching performance in non-clinical settings, there is a critical need for examining these in residency training. Moreover, the little existing research done in clinical teaching settings used qualitative methods only, making it nearly impossible to make inferences based on quantitative evidence. Moreover, nothing is known about differences between specialties in terms of plausible links between personality traits and teaching performance. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the relationship of personality traits with teaching performance of attending physicians within and across surgical and non-surgical specialties. We hypothesize that conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, and openness all positively affect teaching performance. Since the differences between surgical and non-surgical specialties on this matter had not been documented in the literature, we had no specific expectations, electing for an explorative approach to this issue. Attending physicians self-reported their personality traits using the shortened version of the Big Five Inventory, as an additional and optional questionnaire attached to SETQ. The BFI-10 measures personality in five domains according to the Five Factor Model: conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness and openness. Attending physicians could selfreport their personality scales on a 5-point scale. Taking into account BFI authors’ recommendations, we added an extra item for the subscale agreeableness in order to safeguard internal consistency for this subscale, as it showed less internal consistency than the other personality subscales. This way, our BFI contained eleven items, instead of ten.