The Big Five Personality Traits on Job Satisfaction Mediated by Procedural Justice

The aim of this paper is to investigate relations between an isolated dimension of Big Five personality traits and job satisfaction, while considering a mediating effect on this relationship. More specifically, personality traits like Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism or OCEAN, are treated as antecedents of job satisfaction while procedural justice is considered as mediator in understanding the underlying mechanism. Data was gathered via a questionnaire in a cross-sectional study of Big Five Inventory (44 items), Job Satisfaction Survey (12 items) & Procedural Justice (9 items). Primary data were collected from 127 hotel front desk managers working in three-star hotels within central region in Malaysia and were analyzed by using SPSS v25 and PLS-SEM v3.2.8. It was found that across the traits, Neuroticism had the strongest relationship with job satisfaction, while Conscientiousness did not have any relationship with job satisfaction. Procedural justice completely mediated the association between Conscientiousness and job satisfaction, but only partially mediated the relationships between Openness to experience, Extraversion, and Agreeableness and job satisfaction. By assessing the Big-Five personality traits as predictors of job satisfaction, this research adds to the body of knowledge and gives crucial information to indicate that organizations should place a greater emphasis on improving employees’ justice, which is the underlying relationship between personality and job satisfaction. The findings from this paper may allow organizations related to hotel industry to formulate strategic plans to diminish employee turnover rates while increasing job satisfaction and thus profitability.