Big Five Personality Traits and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from a National Sample

Employing the dispositional approach and a national sample, this study re-examined the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and job satisfaction to establish if its findings may challenge the current literature. To achieve this, we exploited a large national sample of 7662 respondents in the UK. Hierarchical regressions were employed to investigate the impact of the Big Five traits on job satisfaction among male, female, young, middle-aged and elderly sub-samples. The results show that extraversion has no significant impact on job satisfaction in any group of employees, whilst up to four other traits are significantly linked to job satisfaction in sub-groups. The younger the employees are the larger number of traits they display that have a significant impact (both positive and negative) 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 that what are 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.