Big Five personality traits and job satisfaction

Abstract

Employing the dispositional approach and a national sample, this study reexamines the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and job satisfaction to establish whether its findings may challenge the current literature. To achieve this, a large national sample of 7662 respondents from the United Kingdom was used. Hierarchical regressions were employed to investigate the impact of the Big Five traits on job satisfaction among male, female, young, middle-aged and elderly subsamples. The results show that extraversion has no significant impact on job satisfaction in any group of employees, while up to four other traits are significantly linked to job satisfaction in subgroups. The younger the employees are, the larger the number of traits they display that have a significant impact (both positively and negatively) on job satisfaction. This study also shows differences in this relationship between male and female employees. These findings imply that the relationships among the Big Five traits and job satisfaction are more complex than shown in the literature. Therefore, using the dispositional approach to job satisfaction, managers should take different approaches to age and gender because job satisfaction is likely to vary among different ages and genders.