This paper examines the relationship between individual personality traits and employee job satisfaction, arguing that an employee's inherent disposition plays a meaningful role in how fulfilled they feel at work. Drawing on the Big Five personality framework — adjustment, sociability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and intellectual openness — the author reviews relevant literature on personality, organizational commitment, and work behavior before presenting a mini-survey administered to over 100 supervised employees. Survey results comparing self-reported personality ratings with job satisfaction scores revealed that employees with more positive personality profiles averaged higher satisfaction ratings. The paper concludes with practical management strategies for fostering positive workplace attitudes and open communication to improve satisfaction and productivity.
This study guide is drawn from PaperDue's library of 130,000+ paper examples across 47 subjects.
The paper demonstrates applied primary research design: the author constructs a survey instrument explicitly derived from an established theoretical model (the Big Five), explains the rationale for each question type, describes the administration process with attention to validity concerns (anonymity, response rate), and then interprets quantitative results in light of the original hypothesis. This theory-to-instrument-to-finding sequence is a core skill in organizational behavior research.
The paper opens with a hypothesis and a roadmap paragraph, then builds a literature-based conceptual foundation covering personality definitions, Big Five traits, and organizational commitment. The middle sections shift to methodology — survey design, distribution, and data coding — followed by results reporting with specific averages (4.1 vs. 3.8). The paper closes with actionable management recommendations, completing a classic introduction–literature–methods–results–discussion arc typical of undergraduate organizational behavior papers.
Employee satisfaction might be one of the most difficult measures in management to quantify. There are so many ways to judge this factor — from self-evaluation to independent evaluation to more concrete numbers like productivity, which has been linked to job satisfaction.
There is no industry-wide standard for assessing employee satisfaction, and yet it is one of the most important factors in a successful work environment. This paper explores the influence of an individual's personality and character traits on their job satisfaction. Rather than seeing job satisfaction solely as a result of outside influences, the central hypothesis is that an employee's individual personality and attitude are important factors in his or her job satisfaction. That is to say, an employee who is otherwise unhappy and gloomy will most likely not be happy in the workplace either; conversely, an employee with a positive outlook and an upbeat personality will tend to be satisfied and fulfilled at work.
This paper first explains the concepts of personality, job satisfaction, and the relationship between job satisfaction and productivity in the workplace, drawing on existing literature — most notably definitions of personality and attitude from relevant scholarly sources, the relationship between character traits and work behavior, and the relationship between outside influences and job performance and satisfaction.
After this examination of personality and its possible influence on work performance, a "mini-survey" administered to over 100 supervised employees is presented and analyzed. The results of this survey are combined with independent employee evaluations and productivity numbers to examine the effects that personality and attitude have on employee satisfaction and, in turn, on productivity. Finally, these findings are evaluated in terms of how best to address personality and attitude in the workplace to encourage job satisfaction and higher performance.
Personality may be defined as "the overall profile or combination of stable characteristics that capture the unique nature of a person." Personality is an important factor in a person's behavior — that is, a person's response to a situation based on both the situation itself and his or her personality.
These two determinants — personality and behavior — are important factors in how an employee performs in the workplace and what type of attitude he or she brings to work. Although research has found that "a simple, direct linkage between job satisfaction and job performance often doesn't exist," this does not diminish the importance of job satisfaction to job performance; it only means that the relationship is more difficult to gauge and measure.
Personality has traditionally been evaluated through an examination of the "Big Five" personality traits — a framework that scholars argue provides an accurate perception of a person's overall personality. The five traits evaluated in this model are adjustment, sociability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and intellectual openness.
Adjustment includes a person's self-confidence and mood stability. Sociability addresses a person's attitude toward others — whether they are friendly and outgoing or shy and quiet. Conscientiousness involves responsibility and dependability. Agreeableness addresses whether a person is warm and polite or uncaring toward others. Finally, intellectual openness assesses whether a person is imaginative and curious or more literal-minded.
These traits provide a standardized assessment of personality and serve as the primary criteria used in this study to assess employee attitudes and personality traits.
Having established a working definition of personality, it is useful to examine the research on how personality influences individual employees' job satisfaction. As noted, a direct linkage between job satisfaction and job performance is difficult to establish; however, indirect effects of job satisfaction and overall personality traits have been documented with respect to job performance and other important outcomes, such as the likelihood of seeking other employment.
At least one study has addressed the importance of hiring employees based on their "fit" with the organization as a whole, and not just the match between an applicant's knowledge, skills, and abilities and their direct job duties. An employee must feel a connection with their organization in order to feel their best about the job they are assigned, and will do their best work when they feel the overall goals of the organization are aligned with their own goals and values.
This idea of "organizational commitment" is described in the relevant literature as "the strength of an employee's involvement in the organization and identification with it." It involves loyalty to the organization as well as the willingness to go "above and beyond" immediate job duties in order to further the organization's goals. Organizational commitment is believed to have a direct effect on productivity, since employees who are loyal to the organization will be more satisfied in their jobs and also more willing to perform at a higher standard.
In examining these varied relationships, it seems evident that an individual's overall personality and character traits influence their job satisfaction. However, the leap from one to the other is not simple, especially when attempting to quantitatively analyze such a theory. The literature examines the links between attitude and general personality traits in terms of general versus specific attitudes and the behaviors each can best predict. General attitudes — such as a person's overall feelings toward religion — are not a good indicator of specific behaviors, such as whether that person will donate to a church-related charity.
However, if the goal is to predict general behavior rather than specific acts, a person's general disposition becomes a more important factor. People who are generally averse to something will be generally less likely to participate in related activities. In applying this distinction between general and specific attitudes to business and management practices, one might separate a general sense of loyalty to the organization from specific likes or dislikes regarding daily tasks. An employee might be broadly happy in their job while specifically disliking, for example, the operating system used in their department. These different dimensions of attitude make gauging employee satisfaction based on personality traits especially complicated and subjective.
You’re 41% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.