12039: Personality Development and Job Satisfaction: A Continuous Time Meta-Analysis (session 25637)

Sunday, July 27, 2025

13:45 - 15:15 CEST (GMT+2)

Location: Bella Center: Hall C- C3-m8

Session Type: Paper Session
Orientation: Research
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/pM6DJx

Author(s)

KY

Kaili Yu

The Chinese U. of Hong Kong
WL

Wen-Dong Li

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
WY

Weiwen Yang

Department of Management, Business School, The Chinese U. of Hong Kong,HK, Hong Kong
YZ

Yanglei Zheng

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
ZZ

Zhen Zhang

Southern Methodist U., United States
CD

Christian Dormann

Johannes Gutenberg-U. Mainz, Germany
HZ

Hannes Zacher

-, Germany
HZ

Huanxi Zhang

The Chinese U. of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
HM

Han Meng

School of Management, Shandong U.

Organizational personality research has predominantly treated personality traits as stable individual characteristics that predict work outcomes. However, recent research in personality psychology suggests that adult personality traits are both relatively stable and able to adapt to life experiences, prompting nascent queries on how work experiences fuel employee personality development. Following the recent emphasis on probing influences of employees’ subjective and idiosyncratic work experiences, we examined how job satisfaction—the subjective evaluation of one’s overall work experiences —may influence, and be influenced by, the big five personality traits at the within-person level. Adopting the continuous time approach, we conducted a preregistered meta-analysis of longitudinal studies (k = 11, N ˜ 142,914). Results demonstrated that within-person changes in job satisfaction were positively related to subsequent changes in conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness, and increases in the big five traits also led to increases in job satisfaction later on. The socialization effects of job satisfaction on personality development were found to be less pronounced than the selection effects of personality traits on job satisfaction, and the magnitudes of the two sets of effects varied over time in an inverted U-shaped manner. Our research highlights the reciprocal relationship between personality traits and job satisfaction at the within-person level and the important role of time in shaping these effects.

view paper (if available)