Personality, job performance, and job satisfaction in non-profit organizations

WCU Author/Contributor (non-WCU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Whittney Breanne Campbell-Bridges (Creator)
Institution
Western Carolina University (WCU )
Web Site: http://library.wcu.edu/
Advisor
David McCord

Abstract: Formal assessment of personality characteristics is common in many organizational settings, for reasons such as personnel selection, personnel training, determining leadership styles and team building. This study documents the use of personality assessment in non-profit organizations and examines the associations between personality and job outcomes among directors of non-profit organizations. Personality traits are associated with many job-related variables, including job satisfaction and job performance. Clearly, the relevance of personality traits to these job-related characteristics is highly dependent on the type of job and type of organization. This paper will also discuss the limitations and problems with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Even though the MBTI is popular in many organizational settings, it is a flawed instrument for measuring personality. Modern personality psychologists agree that the instrument relies on an outdated theory of personality. A better conceptual schema is the five-factor model of personality (FFM), an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is in concordance among personality psychologists as the best measure of personality. The public sector has favored the MBTI (Coe, 1992), but the recent paper by Cooper, Knotts, Johnson, and McCord (in press) argues for the effectiveness of the FFM in this domain. Virtually no literature exists at present with regard to the use of personality assessment within the domain of non-profit and volunteer organizations. The purpose of the current project is to examine the usefulness of FFM-based personality measurement to predict job performance and job satisfaction in the non-profit sector and to compare the FFM to the MBTI in this regard.

Additional Information

Publication
Thesis
Language: English
Date: 2013
Subjects
Nonprofit organizations -- United States -- Employees -- Psychological aspects -- Case studies
Personality assessment -- United States -- Case studies
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator -- Evaluation
Big Five model -- Evaluation

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