Analyzing Personality & Job Satisfaction: A Research Report with SPSS

This report presents a quantitative and analytical study investigating the influence of personality on job satisfaction, based on a sample of 241 employees. The research utilized a 7-point scale to assess personality traits (active, afraid, determined, scared, strong, and upset) and overall job satisfaction. Employees were categorized into three groups according to their tenure. The analysis, conducted using SPSS, included a reliability test, which after recoding, showed acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.631). ANOVA revealed statistically significant differences in overall job satisfaction among the tenure groups. Further analysis through the Tukey post hoc test identified specific differences between groups. A regression analysis determined the influence of personality on job satisfaction, with the strong personality trait showing a positive and statistically significant impact. The report concludes with recommendations based on the findings.

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Personality on Job Satisfaction
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Personality on Job Satisfaction 2
Table of Contents
Executive Summary.....................................................................................................................................3
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................4
Background..............................................................................................................................................4
Problem Background and Problem of the Study......................................................................................4
a. Influence of tenure on job satisfaction........................................................................................4
b. Influence of personality on job satisfaction.................................................................................5
Methodology...........................................................................................................................................6
Measures.................................................................................................................................................6
Findings and discussion...............................................................................................................................6
Reliability test..........................................................................................................................................6
Overall job satisfaction among the three lengths of employment groups...............................................7
Regression Analysis.................................................................................................................................8
Conclusion and recommendations..............................................................................................................9
References.................................................................................................................................................11
Appendix...................................................................................................................................................13

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Executive Summary
The following market research is aimed at finding the association between the personality of a
firm’s staffs and their overall job satisfaction. The personality of the participants was assessed
using a 7-point scale for six items and appraised the overall job satisfaction beside three 7-point
scales. Moreover, the employees were divided into three clusters based on the time in years spent
in employment with the business.
The data collected was then cleaned by removing two case numbers (15 - 16) and the analysis
conducted with SPSS. A reliability test of the general job satisfaction scales was conducted and
found out that there was a fairly high internal consistency. The overall satisfaction with the
profession was compared with the three clusters with regards to their employment duration
where it was found out that there was a statistically significant difference.
A regression analysis was then run between overall satisfaction and the six personality items.
Only the strong personality trait was sound to be statistically significant in influencing job
satisfaction (positive association).
Introduction

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Background
Employees are among the resources which influence an organization (Bakker & Demerouti,
2014). Employees are required to perform well in the activities and roles itemized in their job
description. A better performance requires for an employee to have the knowledge, the right
attitude, and skills required for the job. It is believed that the attitude of employees, their
behavioral impact on the success of the organization, their job satisfaction, and their personalities
are dependent on their attitude and their behavior to a great extent. Personality is a pragmatic
mechanism that is utilized in describing, synthesizing and comprehending human behavior
(O’Neill, Lewis & Carswell, 2011). Each individual is considered unique since no two people are
exactly the same in terms of preferences, temperament, and behavior.
Personality is a characteristic of an individual in his or her pattern of thinking, behavior, and
emotions (Krueger & Markon, 2014). Moreover, it entails the psychological mechanisms which
are either hidden or not behind those patterns. Personality affects individual works in regards to
his or her attitude towards his or her work. Though individuals are deemed as unique, the growth
of personality is a process which is subject to alteration. Change occurs with regards to how
individuals respond to the people and the environment around them since they have the potential
to shape and affect the personality of an individual.
According to Henle & Gross (2014), assessing how the personality of an individual comprehends
and responds to the world is inappropriate and not valid. Hence, it is important to consider the
personality of an individual so as to forecast the performance of an individual. Personality is
assessed through various models which include the MMPI, Kelly’s personal construct theory,
MBTI personality test among many others.
Problem Background and Problem of the Study
a. Influence of tenure on job satisfaction
The tenure of an individual (employment length) can be referred to as the number of years in
which a person has been in employment at his or her current employer (Bidwell, 2013). The
experience is considered vital as it is considered as the status not only by the employee but also
the employers. Various intrinsic variables are considered by employees in order to consider their

Personality on Job Satisfaction 5
decision to stay within their company. In most cases, employees look beyond rewards such as
policies, bonuses, rewards, and praise to assess their perceived value of what they are given.
Job satisfaction is a positive or constructive thought with regards to not only work but also the
work environment (Aziri, 2011). According to Lu et al., (2012), job satisfaction is an action of
the apparent association between what an individual is expecting from work and what one sees
it’s proposing. Hence, the description points out the vitality of both dispositional and situational
elements as job satisfaction determinants.
Ayub & Rafif (2011), acclaimed four main approaches which can be used in exploring and
conceptualizing the effects of length of service on job satisfaction. They include the
multidimensional approach, attitudinal approach, normative approach, and behavioral approach.
According to Bashir et al., (2011), the multi-dimensional approach involves the continuation of
the commitment to stay longer in an organization which in turn influences job satisfaction. The
attitudinal approach focuses on the strong belief and the acceptance of employees to an
organization’s values, goals. Hence they are more willing to use more effort on the
organization’s behalf with a strong aspiration and resolve to remain within the company. Hence,
there is an increase in performance, reduced employee turnover, and reduced absenteeism.
The normative approach argues on the congruency between the goals and values of the employee
and the organization which aim to make the employee have a feeling of obligation to stay longer
in the organization. The behavioral approach views employees’ continuation at their place of
employment due to investments such as formed friendships, time sent in the organization, and
the ties formed within the organization.
b. Personality influence on job satisfaction
It is presumed that there is a close association between personality and the overall job
satisfaction of an employee. The association between both personality and employee overall job
satisfaction hinges on the characteristic of the institution, co-workers and the job (Lange, 2012).
It should be noted that the success of a corporation highly depends on the performance of a staff.
Personality plays a vital part in forecasting the performance and the job satisfaction derivation of
an individual. Personality assessment can be adapted in identifying whether an employee works

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attentively, intelligently, happily or even willingly. Employers use personality assessment in a
bid to prove their decision making with respect to prospective employees.
The following study mainly pays attention to the impact of personality on job satisfaction. The
study focuses on the following personality traits; active, afraid, scared, determined, upset, and
strong. The discoveries of this study are expected to provide more theoretical evidence to fill the
existing literature gap with regards to the impact of personality on job satisfaction. An
experimental study by Yang & Hwang (2014) has been successful in concluding that personality
has a clear influence on overall job satisfaction.
Methodology
The following is a quantitative and analytical study which intends to discover and measure the
influence of personality on job satisfaction. Questionnaires were distributed among various
employees and 243 responses were received. However, two cases were deleted (case 15 and case
16) thereby a sample of 241 was used from the population of 243.
Measures
The six items on personality of the participants in the study was evaluated using a 7-point scale
which ranges from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The overall satisfaction with the
employees’ job was rated along three 7-point scales where job satisfaction 1 was rated from
(very unsatisfied) to 7 (very satisfied), job satisfaction 2 was rated from 1 (very bad) to 7 (very
good), and job satisfaction 3 was rated from 1 (very happy) to 7 (not at all happy). The
employees were divided into three groups based on their tenure with the company. That is 1 = up
to five years, 2 = 6~10 years, and 3 = more than five years.
Findings and discussion
SPSS, a statistical data analysis package which is computer-based, was used in achieving the
study objectives. The results are as follows:
Reliability test
A reliability test was carried out to comprehend whether the questions on job satisfaction of the
questionnaires reliably evaluates the same latent variable on job satisfaction (Drost, 2011). The
most recognized degree of reliability internally or consistency is Cronbach’s alpha. A
Cronbach’s alpha was carried out on the sample size of 241 participants.

Personality on Job Satisfaction 7
It was found out that the Cronbach’s Alpha was -2.5. However, the value of Cronbach’s alpha is
negative. The negative can be attributed to the fact that there is a negative average covariance
among the items. Hence, it violates the assumptions of a reliability model. A negative value
indicates that there is some reverse score in some of the items. The items coding were then
rechecked so as to meet the assumptions of the Cronbach’s Alpha. The third job satisfaction
variable was found to be negative and had to be recoded.
The Cronbach’s alpha obtained after recoding the third item is 0.631. It can be deduced that the
items have a relatively high internal consistency. The summary of the item statistics is as
revealed in table 3 in the appendix. The average of the items is 4.776 with an item variance of
1.257. The average of the scale is 14.33 with a standard deviation of 2.552. On the other hand,
the variance id 6.513.
Overall job satisfaction among the three lengths of employment groups
Table 5 in the appendix shows the descriptive statistics of the three groups of length
employment; more than 10 years, 6 - 10 years, and equal to or less than 5 years,.
To associate the overall satisfaction among the three groups with regard to their tenure, a one-
way ANOVA test was the most suitable. The one-way ANOVA test is the most suitable since it
used in determining whether there are any statistically significant differences between the means
of two or more unrelated clusters (Gonzalez-Rodriguez, Colubi & Gil, 2012).
The data was first checked whether it met the assumptions of a one-way ANOVA. The
dependent variable (overall job satisfaction) is continuous while the independent variable
consists of three categorical independent groups. The next assumption made was that there was
independence of observations, there were no significant outliers and the dependent variable
(overall job satisfaction) was approximately distributed normally for each category of the
independent variable. The last assumption made is that there was no homogeneity of variances.
The Statistics of Levene was used in testing for homogeneity of variances.
It was evident that Levene’s statistics are statistically significant (p<0.05). As a result, the
decision is to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, the groups being compared do not have similar
population variances.

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From the output of the ANOVA, it was observed that the significance value is 0.00, which is
below 0.05. Thus, there is a statistically significant difference in the overall job satisfaction
levels among the three lengths of employment groups. In addition, to know how each group
differed from each other, the results of the multiple comparisons were obtained through the
Tukey post hoc test.
It was evident that there was a statistically significant difference in the overall job satisfaction
level between the group with equal to or less than 5 years and the group with more than 10 years
(p = 0.00), as well as between the group with more than 10 years and 6 - 10 years (p = 0.00).
However, there were no differences between the groups with equal to or less than 5 years and the
group with 6 - 10 years (p = 0.52).
Regression Analysis
A regression analysis was conducted to determine how the 6 personalities influence overall job
satisfaction. The six personalities consisted of an active personality, an afraid personality, a
determined personality, a scared personality, a strong personality, and an upset personality.
The adjusted R square was 0.086. Thus, 8.6% of the variability is due to elements in the model
while 91.4% is explained by elements which are not in the model.
The regression model was found to be statistically significant, 0.00. Since p < 0.05, it is deduced
that the regression model does statistically and significantly forecasts the variable of the
outcome. Thus, the regression model predicts the dependent variable (overall job satisfaction)
significantly well.
The necessary information necessary to forecast the overall job satisfaction from the personality
types and also determining whether these personality traits contributes significantly to the model
is as shown in table 11 in the appendix.
It can be seen that the only statistically significant independent variable which predicts the
dependent variable is the strong personality variable (p < 0.05). Hence, a unit increase in the
strong personality trait leads to a 0.0735 unit increase in the level of job satisfaction.
Multicollinearity was also checked from the data based on VIFs. Table 11 shows that the VIF for
the strong personality trait is 1.208. Hence, there was no multicollinearity in this variable. It
should be noted that multicollinearity affects the p-values and the coefficients. On the other

Personality on Job Satisfaction 9
hand, the VIFs show that the model had instances of severe multicollinearity for some of the
independent variables. However, it should be noted that multicollinearity does not influence the
predictions and the precision of the predictions and the statistics’ goodness of fit. Hence, the
regression model was maintained regardless of the presence of multicollinearity.
It was found that among the employees, the strong personality trait positively impacts job
satisfaction. On the other hand, the other variables were not statistically significant.
Consequently, there are statistical conflations which accept all the formulated hypothesis making
the study findings aligned with Zhai et al., (2013).
According to table 9, it was observed that there the personality traits had a positive variance on
overall job satisfaction. Hence, the variables are deduced to be in a fairly strong linear
relationship. The result of this study is significant to both practical and theoretical scenario in a
bid to expand job satisfaction among employees in their various workplaces.
Conclusion and recommendations
The findings of the study show that the employment length influences job satisfaction of the
employees. It was found out that employees who had longer tenures seemed to be more satisfied
compared to those who served a shorter period.
On the other hand, it was found that among the employees, the strong personality trait positively
impacts job satisfaction. To augment job satisfaction among employees, personality programs
geared towards development need to be successfully implemented. It is the management’s
responsibility to consider personality and enhance their overall job satisfaction of their staffs in a
bid to achieve the maximum target contribution towards the growth and the success of the
organization. In addition, employees who had stayed or a long duration need to be encouraged to
mentor the young generation. This will encourage them and change their attitude regardless of
the work environment.
In addition, it is recommended to pay attention to other factors which affect the job satisfaction
of staffs in various organizations. In an attempt to expand this study, future researchers should
upsurge the sample size of the employees among various organizations.

Personality on Job Satisfaction 10
References
Ayub, N., & Rafif, S. (2011). The relationship between work motivation and job
satisfaction. Pakistan Business Review, 13(2), 332-347.
Aziri, B. (2011). Job Satisfaction: A Literature Review. Management Research & Practice, 3(4).
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2014). Job demands–resources theory. Wellbeing: A complete
reference guide, 1-28.

Personality on Job Satisfaction 11
Bashir, M., Jianqiao, L., Zhao, J., Ghazanfar, F., & Khan, M. M. (2011). The role of
demographic factors in the relationship between high-performance work system and job
satisfaction: A multidimensional approach. International Journal of Business and Social
Science, 2(18).
Bidwell, M. J. (2013). What happened to long-term employment? The role of worker power and
environmental turbulence in explaining declines in worker tenure. Organization
Science, 24(4), 1061-1082.
Drost, E. A. (2011). Validity and reliability in social science research. Education Research and
perspectives, 38(1), 105.
González-Rodríguez, G., Colubi, A., & Gil, M. Á. (2012). Fuzzy data treated as functional data:
A one-way ANOVA test approach. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 56(4),
943-955.
Lu, H., Barriball, K. L., Zhang, X., & While, A. E. (2012). Job satisfaction among hospital
nurses revisited: a systematic review. International journal of nursing studies, 49(8),
1017-1038.
Krueger, R. F., & Markon, K. E. (2014). The role of the DSM-5 personality trait model in
moving toward a quantitative and empirically based approach to classifying personality
and psychopathology. Annual review of clinical psychology, 10, 477-501.
O’Neill, T. A., Lewis, R. J., & Carswell, J. J. (2011). Employee personality, justice perceptions,
and the prediction of workplace deviance. Personality and individual differences, 51(5),
595-600.
Yang, C. L., & Hwang, M. (2014). Personality traits and simultaneous reciprocal influences
between job performance and job satisfaction. Chinese Management Studies, 8(1), 6-26.
Zhai, Q., Willis, M., O'shea, B., Zhai, Y., & Yang, Y. (2013). Big Five personality traits, job
satisfaction and subjective wellbeing in China. International Journal of
Psychology, 48(6), 1099-1108.

Personality on Job Satisfaction 12
Appendix
Table 1: Reliability statistics
Cronbach's
Alphaa
Cronbach's Alpha Based
on Standardized Itemsa N of Items
-2.498 -2.641 3