Veterinarians’ Personality, Job Satisfaction, and Wellbeing

Aside from obvious physical characteristics, people also differ in their psychological aspects. Personality psychology is the science of these personality traits and their correlates and consequences for individuals’ feelings, behaviors, and life outcomes. The dominant view of personality rejects the notion of personality types. Rather, personality differences are described in terms of differences along quantitative dimensions. While there are many personality dimensions, they are related to 5 broad dimensions called the Big Five. The Big Five are named Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Meta-analysis suggests that Neuroticism is the strongest negative predictor of wellbeing, However, relatively little research has examined how neuroticism influences job satisfaction and wellbeing, and it is not clear whether results from other populations generalize to veterinarians. We report results from 2 national representative studies of veterinarians’ personality, job satisfaction, and well-being. We found that neuroticism is the only Big Five factor with notable effects on job satisfaction that contributes to veterinarians’ wellbeing. The second study showed that neuroticism had different relationships with various job aspects. The strongest relationship was found for work-life balance. Our discussion focuses on strategies that might help veterinarians high in neuroticism to improve their work-life balance and to increase their wellbeing.