The relationship between personality and job satisfaction across occupations

Research shows that people select themselves and are selected into occupations, partly because of their personality, and this has implications for their person-environment fit. Although it has been shown that personality congruence between the individual and the environment is important to job satisfaction, the effect of personality congruence in occupations on job satisfaction is not well understood. In a sample of 22,787 individuals, nested within 25 occupational groups from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we examined (1) whether average levels of personality vary across occupational groups, and (2) whether there is a cross-level interaction between the occupational mean personality and the individual's personality, with job satisfaction. We found there were modest differences across occupational groups in all FFM traits. Neuroticism and openness interacted with the corresponding mean personality, showing that for these traits the fit between an individual's personality and the average personality of the occupation makes a difference for job satisfaction.