Maturation of work attitudes: Correlated change with big five personality traits and reciprocal effects over 15 years

• Author: Bart Wille,Joeri Hofmans,Marjolein Feys,Filip De Fruyt
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.1905
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014

Maturation of work attitudes: Correlated

change with big five personality traits

and reciprocal effects over 15 years

BART WILLE

1

*, JOERI HOFMANS

2

, MARJOLEIN FEYS

3

AND FILIP DE FRUYT

1

1

Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

2

Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

3

Department of Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Summary As employees grow older, do their attitudes regarding work change over time? Can such long-term changes be

understood from a personality development perspective? The present study addressed these fundamental ques-

tions by tracking 504young professionals’work attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and work involvement) and Big

Five personalitytraits over the first 15years of their professionalcareer. We specifically investigate d whether trait

changes drive peoples’changing attitudes, a mechanism we called maturation of work attitudes. Latent change

models first indicated significant associations between traits and attitudes at the beginning of the career, and

mean-level changes in Big Five traits (i.e., increases in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and decreases in

Neuroticism)in the direction of greaterfunctional maturity. Although no significantmean-level changes in work

attitudes were observed, results regarding correlated change indicated that variabilityin attitude change was re-

lated to variabilityin trait change and that this indeed signaleda maturational process. Finally, reciprocal effect

estimateshighlighted bidirectionalrelations betweenpersonality and attitudesover time. It is discussed howthese

results(i) provide a better understanding of potentialage effects on work-relatedattitudes and (ii)imply a revision

of the traditional dispositionalapproach to attitudes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley& Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: work attitudes; aging; personality; job satisfaction; work involvement

Work attitudes have recently been described as one of the oldest, most popular, and most influential areas of inquiry in

the organizational behavior (OB) literature (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012). One notable reason for this is that

they are traditionally conceived as predictors of a wide range of important work-related behaviors. The association

between employee satisfaction and in-role performance, for instance, is among the most frequently studied phenom-

ena in applied psychology (Brief & Weiss, 2002). Similarly, a central question in the attitude literature is whether

involvement in work is predictive for extra-role behaviors, such as organizational citizenship behaviors (Diefendorff,

Brown, Kamin, & Lord, 2002).

Given their importance, many studies have aimed at uncovering the antecedents of work attitudes, and increased

attention is being devoted in this line of research to their dispositional source (e.g., Judge & Larsen, 2001; Staw &

Cohen-Charash, 2005). Early researchers such as Staw and Ross (1985) and Steel and Rentsch (1997) found work attitudes

to be relatively stable over time and used such findings to argue for a dispositionalsource. More recently, further evidence

for this dispositional approach has been provided by studies that have directly demonstrated cross-sectional and longitu-

dinal associations between prominent dispositional models, including the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality

(McCrae & Costa, 1987), and the most prominent work attitudes, including satisfaction and involvement (Bowling, Beehr,

& Lepisto, 2006; Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002). Overall, it is now grounded to say that differences in work-related

attitudes, defined as “the evaluation or personal importance of work-related targets”(Riketta, 2008, p. 472), can be

at least partially traced back to differences in disposition or temperament (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012).

*Correspondence to: Bart Wille, Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, H. Dunantlaan 2, B-9000

Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: bart.wille@ugent.be

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 4 April 2012

Revised 8 July 2013, Accepted 3 October 2013

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 35, 507–529 (2014)

Published online 4 November 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1905

Research Article

Further, because knowledge about age–attitudes relationships can improve our understanding of differences

between younger and older workers in terms of productivity and/or work role engagement (Ng & Feldman,

2010), researchers have become increasingly interested in whether employees’attitudes change as they grow

older. At this point, research indeed indicates that age relates positively to a number of work attitudes (Ng &

Feldman, 2010), suggesting that older employees generally tend, for example, to be more satisfied with their jobs

and involved in their work compared with younger employees. Relatively little research, however, has compared

work attitudes within the same individuals at different and widely separated points in time. As a result, it remains

an open question whether the apparent between-person pattern of increase can also be detected within individuals

as they become older. Moreover, and related, the fundamental question of why work attitudes might be inclined to

increase over time remains largely unresolved (Ng & Feldman, 2010).

Indeed, it has recently been pointed out that chronological age is only an index and that it is of utmost impor-

tance to gain a better understanding of how age-related changes in psychological variables affect organizational

outcomes such as work attitudes (Ng & Feldman, 2008, 2010; Schwall, 2012). Drawing on the rich literature

on the dispositional sources of work-related attitudes, one particular developmental process that has specifically

been highlighted in this regard involves transitions in personality traits during adulthood. For instance, Ng and

Feldman (2010) suggested that increases in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness over one’slifecoursemight

provide an explanation for why age would be associated with more favorable attitudes concerning work.

Similarly, Costanza, Badger, Fraser, Severt, and Gade (2012) suggested within-individual changes in traits such

as Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism as a possible explanatory mechanism for observed genera-

tional differences in job satisfaction. To date, however, no study has sought to empirically validate this

mechanism, and the paucity of research in this area represents a serious gap in an organizational literature that

is increasingly interested in age issues and lifespan approaches to organizational phenomena (e.g., Truxillo,

Cadiz, Rineer, Zaniboni, & Fraccaroli, 2012).

The present study re-investigates age effects on work-related attitudes and addresses this issue from a person-

ality development perspective. Specifically, the contributions of this study to the literature on age effects on work-

related attitudes are threefold. First, on a theoretical level, this article further develops the idea of how changes in

personality traits can drive changes in work-related attitudes (broader than job satisfaction) through their influence

on different aspects of the attitude formation process, namely work evaluation and work identification. Second,

we will substantiate this idea of trait changes as drivers of changes in work-related attitudes by incorporating the-

ory on personality development into the lifespan perspective on work-related attitudes. Drawing on the Maturity

Principle of personality trait change during adulthood (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005; Roberts & Wood, 2006),

we will refer to this process as maturation of work attitudes. Third, the present study is the first to empirically test

this idea of correlated change between personality traits and two important work-related attitudes, that is, job

satisfaction and work involvement, using an appropriate longitudinal research design that covers a substantial

and significant period, namely the first 15 years of the professional career. In this regard, the present study

responds to repeated calls in the OB literature to study the effects of aging using a longitudinal research design

that tracks intraindividual changes accompanying aging, rather than relying on indirect cross-sectional comparisons

(Ng & Feldman, 2008, 2010, 2012).

Although various dispositional models are eligible, it can be argued that the FFM is, to date, most appro-

priate to examine how dispositional changes are associated with changes in work attitudes. First, the FFM has

the advantage of being the most popular and widely investigated personality taxonomy, whose traits have

proven their relevance to many criteria in OB, including job attitudes, job performance, leadership, and work

motivation (Judge, Heller, & Klinger, 2008). Second, FFM traits are relevant to affect-driven attitudes such as

job satisfaction (e.g., Judge et al., 2002) as well as to attitudes that tap into the relative importance of work to

individuals and that are more value driven (e.g., Judge & Ilies, 2002). Finally, given their central position in

the personality literature, the long-term change trajectories of Big Five traits have extensively been

documented (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006), allowing specific hypotheses concerning the effects of

trait changes on attitude change.

508 B. WILLE ET AL.

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 35, 507–529 (2014)

DOI: 10.1002/job