The impact of personality on employee job performance: an empirical study of non-academic employees of the universities in the eastern province of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Personality is a potentially important predictor of work behavior. Matching people to jobs matters is very important because when people do not fir with their jobs or the organization, they are more likely to leave, it create more prolem to tha organization to replace them. Many researchers have attempted to investigate the influence of individual, group, and organizational variables on job performance, but enough researches have not been done in Sri Lanka relevant io this area. This study is to gain a better understanding of the impact of personality on employee job performance of with reference to the non-academic employees of the universities operating in the eastern province of Sri Lanka. The conceptual model was formulated to the influence of employee personality on employee job performance. The study generated about 81 percent response rate from 190 nonacademic employees who had worked at these two Universities. Responses from the survey were statistically analyzed with the software SPSS validity and reliability of the questionnaire was satisfactory. It was found that employee personality had a strong positive correlation with employee job performance (r = 0.558). The result of simple regression analysisrevealed that employee personality was the strongest predictor, which explains 31.1% of the variation in employee job performance. The remaining 68.9% of variation not explain by this variable. The finding revealed the employee personality was found to be the critical personal factor to improve the employee job performance.