Impact of openness to experience on
Openness personality
For example, openness to experience was a particularly strong predictor of job performance in situations requiring creativity, while extraversion played a key role in contexts involving social interactions. Applied to the context of the present study, upward job changes into managerial and professional positions may provide employees with new situations that have a different trait-activation potential than previous situations. More particularly, results suggested that employees who cognitively and emotionally invested in their jobs showed both cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in their Big Five personality characteristics. By consistently behaving according to the requirements of the situation, those characteristics may then be enhanced. Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology. Hypothesis 1: Openness to experience positively predicts upward job changes into managerial and professional positions. Additionally, people who emigrated from the islands to the mainland tended to be more open to experience than people who stayed on the islands, and than those who immigrated to the islands. Age and Openness Your openness to experience will likely vary throughout your lifespan, as revealed by research into responses to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Epidemiologic Followup Study. Big Five Characteristics Openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability were assessed in and with 28 items based on the well-validated Big Five mini-markers scales developed by Saucier [ 69 ]. Upward job changes into these positions indeed entail new situations that require employees to adapt to new people with ideas and opinions different from their own, new job requirements, and new environments [ 20 ]. Agreeableness Employees who experience upward job changes into managerial and professional positions need to adapt to new social structures in different work environments with new colleagues and superiors.Previous research has shown that employees differ in their attitudes toward job mobility and in the way they perceive mobility opportunities [ 20 ], and only very few empirical studies have so far examined relationships between the Big Five and actual job changes across time [ 89101112 ].
Such research designs do not account for the possibility that the relationship may dynamically change over time.
Methods Participants To test our hypotheses, we used data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia HILDA survey, a national representative panel study that has been conducted annually since and surveys approximately 20, individuals each year [ 65 ]. According to trait-activation theory [ 56 ], the situations in managerial and professional positions should thus have a high trait-activation potential for extraversion, such that employees may become more extraverted in response to upward job changes into such positions.
More particularly, results suggested that employees who cognitively and emotionally invested in their jobs showed both cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in their Big Five personality characteristics. Such people are often more willing to try out new activities that they have not experienced previously.
This may be due to the fact that organizational decision makers are likely to regard extraverted employees as well-suited for positions that require frequent social interactions and leadership behaviors e. Extraversion has furthermore emerged as one of the main predictors of job performance, especially in occupations that involve social interaction [ 19 ].
Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology. However, emotional stability is also the characteristic that most consistently predicts job satisfaction [ 5 ], so that employees may be less likely to be willing to leave their current position.
They may therefore be regarded as especially well-suited for leadership positions in which cooperation and teamwork are required [ 48 ], and thus experience upward job changes especially into managerial and professional positions.
However, most of this work was cross-sectional and thus did not allow the investigation of effects of extraversion on subsequent upward job changes over a period of time.