Field pea is an important pulse crop in Ethiopia. However, the national productivity of field pea is low and thus knowledge on the nature and magnitude of character association and identification of important character is a prerequisite for the development of high yielding field pea genotypes. Hence a total of 49 field pea genotypes were grown in 7x 7 simple lattice design at two environments during 2018/19 main cropping season to estimate the magnitude of association among characters and to study the contribution of direct and indirect effect of different characters on grain yield in field pea genotypes. Positive and significant genotypic correlation observed between grain yield with plant height (rg=0.67), seeds per pod (rg = 0.45), days to maturity (rg =0.41) and pods per plant (rg=0.33). In additions, genotypic path analysis showed that plant height (0.746) exerted the maximum positive direct effect on grain yield followed by stand count at harvest (0.443), 1000 seed weight (0.372), seeds per pod (0.214), pods per plant (0.213), and days to maturity (0.013). Finally, selection for traits such as plant height, pods per plant, seeds per pod and days to maturity could improve grain yield in field pea.

Keywords: correlation, direct effect, indirect effect, path coefficient