The role of employee personality in employee satisfaction and turnover: insights from online employee reviews

Abstract

Purpose

Online employee reviews have emerged as a crucial information source for business managers to evaluate employee behavior and firm performance. The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between employee personality traits, derived from online employee reviews and job satisfaction and turnover behavior at the individual level.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors apply text-mining techniques to extract personality traits from online employee reviews on Indeed.com based on the Big Five theory. They also apply a machine learning classification algorithm to demonstrate that incorporating personality traits can significantly enhance employee turnover prediction accuracy.

Findings

Personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness are positively associated with job satisfaction, while extraversion and neuroticism are negatively related to job satisfaction. Moreover, the impact of personality traits on overall job satisfaction is stronger for former employees than for current employees. Personality traits are significantly linked to employee turnover behavior, with a one-unit increase in the neuroticism score raising the probability of an employee becoming a former employee by 0.6%.

Practical implications

These findings have implications for firm managers looking to gain insights into employee online review behavior and improve firm performance. Online employee review websites are recommended to include the identified personality traits.

Originality/value

This study identifies employee personality traits from automated analysis of employee-generated data and verifies their relationship with employee satisfaction and employee turnover, providing new insights into the development of human resources in the era of big data.

Citation

Wu, R., Zhao, X., Li, Z. and Xie, Y. (2024), "The role of employee personality in employee satisfaction and turnover: insights from online employee reviews", Personnel Review, Vol. 53 No. 7, pp. 1581-1611. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-04-2023-0309