Two studies in leading international journals examine the long-term reciprocal relationships between personality, income, and job satisfaction.

Two new publications co-authored by Prof. Dr. Christian Dormann examine how personality traits and key aspects of working life are related over longer periods of time. Published in Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Applied Psychology, the studies show that personality not only influences how people experience their working lives and the professional outcomes they achieve. Conversely, work-related experiences and developments can also be associated with subsequent changes in personality. The time period under consideration is crucial to understanding these relationships.

Personality is often regarded as a relatively stable factor shaping how people experience their work, the career decisions they make, and how successful they are in their working lives. The two new studies broaden this perspective. They investigate the temporal dynamics between personality and work-related developments and, in particular, examine whether relationships can be observed in both directions.

The first study was published in Psychological Bulletin, one of the leading international journals in psychology. It examined the reciprocal temporal relationships between income and the five fundamental dimensions of personality, commonly known as the “Big Five.” The analysis was based on a continuous-time meta-analysis of eleven large longitudinal studies involving a total of 134,515 participants.

The results show that changes in income are associated with subsequent changes in several personality traits. Predominantly positive temporal relationships were found for emotional stability and conscientiousness, while partly opposing patterns emerged for extraversion. At the same time, relationships were also observed in the opposite direction: changes in personality traits were associated with subsequent changes in income.

The second study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a leading international journal in work and organizational psychology. It focuses on the reciprocal temporal relationships between job satisfaction and personality. The international research team combines a preregistered continuous-time meta-analysis of eleven longitudinal studies involving a total of 142,914 participants with an independent 11-wave study conducted in Germany with more than 2,000 employed individuals.

Across both investigations, reciprocal temporal relationships were found in particular between job satisfaction, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. Reciprocal means that changes in personality can be associated with subsequent changes in job satisfaction, while changes in job satisfaction can, in turn, be associated with subsequent changes in personality. However, the strength of these relationships varies depending on the sample, the work context, and the time period examined.

A distinctive methodological feature of both studies is the use of the Continuous-Time Meta-Analysis method, or CoTiMA, developed by Christian Dormann. The method makes it possible to jointly analyze findings from longitudinal studies with different time intervals and different numbers of measurement waves. This allows researchers to examine more precisely how the strength of reciprocal relationships changes over time. Conventional meta-analyses can account for such differences in study time frames only to a limited extent. Taken together, the two studies demonstrate that personality in working life should not be viewed exclusively as an unchanging starting condition. Personality, work-related experiences, and professional outcomes can influence one another over the life course or change together over time.