The Role of Psycho-Social Dynamics Between Personality Traits and Role Stressors in College Lecturers: Mediation and Moderation

Abstract

Psycho-social factors at workplace discourse the lines between and among working environment, job content, organizational structure, employees' abilities, different job demands and job outcomes. These constructs through perception and experience, influence mental and physical health as well as job outcomes. The main goal of the present study was to inspect the association among psycho-social factors (life satisfaction and social support), personality traits, role conflict, role ambiguity, and jobs stress in college lecturers. Moreover, this study was also intended to investigate the mediating and moderating role of psycho-social factors in the link between personality traits, role conflict, role ambiguity and jobs stress in college lecturers. Purposive-convenient sampling technique was applied base on cross-sectional research design. Six scales, satisfaction with life scale, social support scale, personality inventory, role conflict, role ambiguity scale and job stress scale were employed to assess personality traits, role conflict or ambiguity, social support, life satisfaction of college lecturers.   One hundred twenty lecturers were enrolled from different public and private colleges of Faisalabad, Pakistan from August, 2019 to January, 2020.   This study’s results demonstrated that extrovert trait of personality was significantly predicting to life satisfaction (β=1.13, p<.01), role conflict (β = -.27, p<.01) and interaction between social support and life satisfaction (β=.13, p<.05) in college lecturers. On the other hand, emotionally stable trait of personality was also significantly predicting to life satisfaction (β= -1.24, p<.05), role conflict (β = .53, p<.000), role ambiguity (β = -.37, p<.01) and interaction between social support and life satisfaction (β=.20, p<.01) in college lecturers. Interestingly, life satisfaction was significantly predicting to job stress (β = -5.18, p<.000), while job stress was significantly predicting to life satisfaction (β = .75, p<.05) in college lecturers. Additionally, this present study illustrated that life satisfaction fully mediated between job stress, extrovert, and emotional stable traits of personality in lecturers. Conversely, this study’s findings also demonstrated that social support was not plating role of moderator on the relationship among personality traits, role ambiguity, role conflict, and jobs stress in lecturers.  The results suggest that better knowledge of personality extents might be helpful to design effective interventions for minimizing the negative consequences of role stressors and enhance social support for the upgrading of positive attitudes.