IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/diw/diwsop/diw_sp1138.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Personality Maturation and Personality Relaxation: Differences of the Big Five Personality Traits in the Years around the Beginning and Ending of Working Life

Author

Listed:
  • Eva Asselmann
  • Jule Specht

Abstract

Objective: At work, people are confronted with clear behavioral expectations. In line with the Social Investment Principle, the beginning and ending of working life might thus promote changes in personality traits that are relevant at work (e.g., Conscientiousness). Method: Based on the data from the Socio- Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we examined nuanced differences of the Big Five personality traits in the years around the beginning and ending of working life. Whether participants had started working or retired in the past year was assessed yearly. The Big Five personality traits were assessed in four waves between 2005 and 2017. Results: In people who started working, multilevel analyses revealed that Conscientiousness was higher in the first year of working life versus all other years. Extraversion was higher in and after the first year of working life versus before, and Agreeableness increased gradually in the three years after people had started working. In people who retired, Conscientiousness was lower in and after the first year of retirement versus before. No other traits differed around the start of retirement. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the start of working life might promote personality maturation and that retirement might promote personality “relaxation.”

Suggested Citation

  • Eva Asselmann & Jule Specht, 2021. "Personality Maturation and Personality Relaxation: Differences of the Big Five Personality Traits in the Years around the Beginning and Ending of Working Life," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1138, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1138
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.826682.de/diw_sp1138.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andreas Falke & Nadine Schröder & Claudia Hofmann, 2022. "The influence of values in sustainable consumption among millennials," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 92(6), pages 899-928, August.
    2. Di Ye & Bin Xu & Bingling Wei & Linlin Zheng & Yenchun Jim Wu, 2024. "Employee work engagement in the digital transformation of enterprises: a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-15, December.
    3. Eva Asselmann & Elke Holst & Jule Specht, 2022. "Longitudinal Bidirectional Associations between Personality and Becoming a Leader," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1167, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    age differences; career; development; employment; first job; gender differences; life event; life transition; longitudinal; retirement;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1138. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sodiwde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.