The Relationship Between Personality and Job Attribute Preferences

Abstract

The success of an organisation is contingent upon the attraction of highly talented individuals. Thus, in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors, organisations must offer such individuals a rewards package that they find attractive. The limited literature on this topic has identified various relationships between job attribute preferences and personality traits. However, only weak relationships have been established between these concepts, and there is evidence to suggest that this is related to the bandwidth-fidelity problem. Some authors argue that the solution to this problem is to test personality at the facet level, which would provide more analytical and predictive power. This also allows for the possibility of facets within a particular trait exerting countervailing effects upon job attribute preferences, which might otherwise obscure trait level relationships. The present study aimed to investigate these ideas through an online survey assessing the personality and job attribute preferences of 143 first-year psychology students at the University of Adelaide. Multiple hierarchical regression was used to control for various demographic variables, before Akaike’s Information Criterion was utilised to compare the predictive power of personality traits to their respective facets within the Five-Factor Model of personality. The results indicated not only that personality is related to job attribute preferences, but that facets can predict in opposite directions and thus improve analytical power in some circumstances. These findings have implications for improving the validity of personality testing in recruitment settings, and for further research on how organisations can attract applicants with particular personality characteristics.