The study of the impact of personality traits on job satisfaction and commitment among employees in an educational setting

Abstract

Personality constructs have been demonstrated to be of the main predictors for explaining and predicting satisfaction and commitment of employees at work. Employees’ personalities and personality traits play a significant role in their perception of life as individuals in general, and of work life as employees in organizations in particular. This thesis examines the impact that personality traits have on teacher- employees’ level of job satisfaction and commitment. A correlational study was performed to identify the relationships between the variables, where 99 employees (n=99), in a representative sample of the working Lebanese teachers who are employed at private educational centers, complete the Big Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2) for personality and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) for job satisfaction. The scales were statistically analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 19. Results showed that dimension of agreeableness was positively correlated with job satisfaction (r=.31, p<.01), and marginally correlated with job commitment (r=.09, p=.17). The opposite pattern was observed for the neuroticism dimension of BFI, where neuroticism scores were negatively associated with job satisfaction scores(r=-.35, p<.01) but positively correlated with job commitment(r=.18, p=.03). Conscientiousness was positively correlated with job satisfaction(r=.12, p=.10). Sociability, another name for extraversion, was marginally positively correlated with job satisfaction(r=.10, p=.14) and commitment (r=.09, p=.18). No correlation was found between openness to experience and job satisfaction and commitment. In the light of these result, the cumulative data reports the apparent correlation coefficients between personality traits and job satisfaction and commitment, an agenda for future research in other educational and organizational settings.