Personality traits, workers’ age, and job satisfaction: The moderated effect of conscientiousness

Eleonora Topino, Conceptualization , Data curation , Investigation , Methodology , Writing – original draft , Writing – review & editing , # 1 Annamaria Di Fabio, Conceptualization , Data curation , Investigation , Methodology , Writing – original draft , Writing – review & editing , # 2 Letizia Palazzeschi, Data curation , Investigation , Writing – original draft , Writing – review & editing , # 2 and Alessio Gori, Conceptualization , Data curation , Investigation , Methodology , Writing – original draft , Writing – review & editing # 3, *

Eleonora Topino

1 Department of Human Sciences, LUMSA University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Annamaria Di Fabio

2 Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Letters and Psychology (Psychology Section), University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Letizia Palazzeschi

2 Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Letters and Psychology (Psychology Section), University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Alessio Gori

3 Department of Health Sciences–University of Florence, Florence, Italy

2 Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Letters and Psychology (Psychology Section), University of Florence, Florence, Italy

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Associated Data

Data are available from figshare (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.13634972).

Abstract

Job satisfaction has gained increasing interest in the world of work and a vast field of research has been stimulated regarding its antecedents. Among these, personality traits have received consistent and significant attention, with a particular emphasis on conscientiousness. To delve deeper and detail these aspects, in the present research, a moderation model was hypothesized, with the aim of investigating the effect of age on the association between conscientiousness (and its subdimensions scrupulousness and perseverance) and job satisfaction. The age-moderated interactions of the other Big Five personality traits were also explored. The study involved 202 Italian workers (92 men, 110 women) with a mean age of 44.82 years (SD = 10.56) who completed the Big Five Questionnaire and the Job Satisfaction Scale. The results showed a positive association between conscientiousness and job satisfaction. This was moderated by age to the extent that it was significant for younger and average-age workers and was less significant for older workers. Similar results were found for the subdomain of perseverance, while the relationship between scrupulousness and job satisfaction was not significant. Furthermore, no age-moderated interaction between the other Big Five personality traits and Job satisfaction were found. Such data supports interactive models that highlight the need to integrate personality traits with other factors in exploring the antecedents of job satisfaction. These findings provide additional elements to an understanding of the factors contributing to workers satisfaction, and could have important applicative implications in a framework for healthy organizations and the well-being movement.

Introduction

Job satisfaction is a construct that is increasingly growing and attracting consistent interest in the field of work and organizational psychology [1]. It includes cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects [2] and can be defined as “an evaluative state that expresses contentment with, and positive feelings about, one’s job” [3] (p. 347).

Research into job satisfaction has focused, above all, on the consequences resulting from different levels of job satisfaction and on the antecedents of this construct. Job satisfaction is seen as having numerous applications and repercussions both at work and on people’s everyday lives [2,3]. Job satisfaction is shown to be associated with numerous organizational outcomes, such as higher commitment [4], greater job involvement [5], improved performance [6], better organizational citizenship [7], and also with lower levels of turnover intentions [8], less absenteeism [9] and fewer counterproductive work behaviors [10,11]. Moreover, job satisfaction can be considered a sub-domain of the larger construct, life-satisfaction, which in turn, is a component of subjective well-being [12–14]. Previous research has reported negative relationships between job satisfaction and distress [15], burnout [16,17], and anxiety [18], as well as positive associations between job satisfaction and marital satisfaction [19,20], happiness [21], and psychophysical health [18,22]. Therefore, evidence supports the importance of focusing on job satisfaction both for its effect on organizational functioning [23] and for ethical reasons: according to the vision for decent work [24–27], work should be sustainable and meaningful within a broader framework of a decent life [28,29]. Job satisfaction is an essential construct in the framework of healthy organizations [30,31]. This perspective underlines the relevance to explore personality and individual differences in relation to workers’ well-being. Job satisfaction also emerged as important in the framework of the well-being movement [32,33] that highlights the value of reducing negative outcomes and promoting individual resources to enhance both well-being and productivity. This supports both the relevance of workers’ well-being to organizational success and healthy business, and its critical link with strength-based prevention perspectives [34]. Therefore, the well-being of employees and organizational performance are both at the center of focus and are nourished by one another [33,35], where health is seen as optimal functioning [36–38] and a reflection of one’s satisfaction with both work and life [39,40].

Given this evidence concerning its applicability and centrality to the working world, a study of the precursors to satisfaction with one’s work appears both necessary and useful [3,41,42]. In support of this perspective, the general aim of the present research was to deepen the understanding of the antecedents to job satisfaction.

The scientific literature concerning the variables associated with job satisfaction highlights several approaches, which can be grouped into dispositional, environmental, and integrative [2]. With regards to individual factors, personality traits emerge as important predictors of job satisfaction [43,44], with particular reference to the Big Five model of Costa and McCrae [45], which has proved particularly effective in the study of the dispositional sources of job satisfaction [44]. This structure does not imply that personality differences can be reduced to just five traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness), but with these, it is possible to obtain a sufficiently complete and exhaustive representation, in which each dimension summarizes and contains other, more specific, characteristics [45,46]. Among the five traits, the conscientiousness one (consisting in the dimensions of scrupulousness and perseverance) [45,47] has been showed as particularly relevant in the organizational context by several studies, highlighting its associations with important work outcomes, such as attitudes [48,49], job satisfaction [50], performance [51,52], relationships with leaders [53], response to workplace stressors [54], and organizational citizenship behaviors [55]. More specifically, the relationship with job satisfaction was also pointed by previous meta-analyzes, which showed that conscientiousness showed significant positive associations [13], sometimes the highest among different traits of the big five [44,56,57]. Conscientious people tend to be well-organized, self-disciplined, hardworking, growth and success-oriented, persevering, and motivated in the pursuit of established goals [58,59]. Taken together, these factors favor greater efficiency and increase the probability of obtaining satisfactory rewards in the work context, both formally (e.g., promotion) and informally (e.g., esteem and reputation) [44].

However, although the scientific literature has highlighted the association between personality traits and job satisfaction [44], these dispositions may not play an exclusive role in determining motivation and job satisfaction during working life [60]. For example, the Baltes’ model of Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC) [61] argues that old age is associated with a decline in motivation concerning job growth and an increase in factors relating to regulation-loss and the maintenance of status. Therefore, the energy invested in the initial objectives of success and the expenditure of effort toward achievement that is typical of the younger worker tends to be replaced by a reallocation of resources toward preserving one’s own situation and avoiding losses in older age [62,63].

Based on this theoretical framework, the purpose of this study is to gain insights regarding the relationships between workers’ ages, conscientiousness, and job satisfaction. Therefore, a moderation model was hypothesized, in which the interaction between conscientiousness and job satisfaction was moderated by age (see Fig 1A ), with the expectation that the association with this personality trait is stronger for younger workers. Furthermore, the age-moderated relationship between the subdomains of conscientiousness (scrupulousness and perseverance) and job satisfaction was explored.