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The Heritability of Job Satisfaction Reconsidered: Only Unique Environmental Influences Beyond Personality

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree to which genetic and environmental influences explain differences in job satisfaction and its relationship to personality in order to explain the heritability of job satisfaction.

Design

Behavior genetic analyses are based on a dataset containing 622 individuals, including 185 MZ (M = 39.5 years) and 126 DZ twin pairs (M = 40.1 years).

Findings

The results showed that all genetic influences (28 %) on job satisfaction could be explained by its relation to personality, especially Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness, representing a high genetic overlap between job satisfaction and personality. Non-shared environmental influences explained the remaining three fourths of the variance.

Implications

By showing that genetic influences of job satisfaction overlap completely with personality, including common non-additive genetic influences, the results support an interactionist view of job satisfaction in that both situational and dispositional determinants of job satisfaction are relevant.

Originality

In contrast to previous studies, we used a more appropriate behavior genetic approach meaning that our approach allows to directly estimate parameters of specific and common (additive and non-additive) genetic and environmental influences. Building on this, interpretations of behavior genetic findings were explained in detail to avoid common misunderstandings.

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Notes

  1. Ilies and Judge (2003) used the following formula to compute the partial heritability (\(h_{\text{p}}^{2}\)) for job satisfaction mediated by the Big Five (\(h_{\text{p}}^{2} = \sum {(h_{\text{i}} \beta_{\text{i}} )^{2} }\)). First, this means that the values for \(\beta_{\text{i}}\) were assumed to affect genetic and environmental variance to the same extent. But it could also be the case that \(\beta_{\text{i}}\) involves only genetic or environmental influences or both to different degrees. Second, they summarized the effect of each personality trait based on the assumption of orthogonal factors. With regard to job satisfaction, it could also be the case that the variance components explained by the personality traits were not completely independent.

  2. TNS Infratest is a German institute for market and opinion research. Homepage at http://www.tns-infratest.com/.

  3. SOEP questionnaires are available online at http://panel.gsoep.de/soepinfo2011/.

  4. As the personality traits were not independent, we also modeled all possible intercorrelations between the Big Five personality traits in the regression model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Saarland University, 66041, Saarbruecken, Germany

    Elisabeth Hahn, Juliana Gottschling, Cornelius J. König & Frank M. Spinath

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  1. Elisabeth Hahn
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  2. Juliana Gottschling
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  3. Cornelius J. König
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  4. Frank M. Spinath
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Hahn.

Appendix

Appendix

In order to compare the methodology of the presents study to those performed in the Ilies and Judge (2003) study, we directly transferred our Cholesky decomposition model into their formula: (\(h_{\text{p}}^{2} = \sum {(h_{\text{i}} \beta_{\text{i}} )^{2} }\)). We used β i-values from our latent path regression model and heritability estimates (h i) from our latent behavior genetic model. If we use the Ilies and Judge’s formula, we find a partial heritability of job satisfaction of about 11.7 %, which would imply that 42 % of the total heritability of job satisfaction (\(h_{\text{total}}^{2} = 28\%\)) would seem to be mediated by common genetic effects with personality. As can be seen by the direct comparison of the results, the partial heritability of job satisfaction controlled for the personality traits would be underestimated when the formula of Ilies and Judge (2003) is used.

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Hahn, E., Gottschling, J., König, C.J. et al. The Heritability of Job Satisfaction Reconsidered: Only Unique Environmental Influences Beyond Personality. J Bus Psychol 31, 217–231 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-015-9413-x

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