Predicting Job Performance through Employee's Personality Traits and Occupational Commitment: A Study of East Azarbaijan Youth and Sport Office's Staffs

This study aimed to predict job performance through employee’s personality traits and occupational commitment.
This survey was descriptive, and of all the 160 Eastern Azarbaijan Youth and Sport offices’ staff, 108 people completed the Meyer et al. (1993) occupational commitment, NEO’s (1985) personality traits, and Patterson’s (1992) job performance questionnaires as the statistical sample. The questionnaires’ surface and content validity were verified by the sport management experts, and also their reliability was calculated using the Cronbach’s alpha method. The collected data was analyzed using the Pearson correlation coefficient and also the multiple regressions tests.
Findings: The results obtained showed that there was a positive significant relationship between the occupational commitment and the job performance (r = 0.388, P = 0.001). Significant relationships were observed between the effective (r = 0.384, P = 0.001) and normative (r = 0.454, P = 0.001) occupational commitments with job performance. The relationship between the continued occupational commitment and the job performance was not significant (r = -0.018, P = 0.855). The regression results obtained showed that 22.3 percent of job performance variances were predictable by the occupational commitment dimensions. Other results illustrated that job performance had a negative relationship with neuroticism (r = -0.279) and positive relationship with extraversion (r = 0.564), openness (r = 0.371), agreeableness (r = 0.207), and conscientiousness (r = 0.613). In addition, 41.1 percent of job performance variances was predictable by the personality dimensions.
It can be concluded that the employees’ occupational commitment and the personality dimensions could improve their job performance. Hence, Youth and Sport offices’ managers should keep considering improvement of current staff’s occupational commitment or employment of highlevel occupational commitment employees or those with special personality traits in order to reduce staff’s turn-over, increase job satisfaction, and finally, improve their job performance.