Getting a grip on the gripers: Curmudgeon personality's relationships with job attitudes and employee well-being

Some people are curmudgeons-they dislike most things. Individual differences in curmudgeon personality are assessed by having respondents provide evaluations of heterogeneous sets of everyday objects. Prior research has found that curmudgeon personality is distinct from more established personality traits and is related to various attitudes-particularly job and consumer attitudes. We extend that research by examining curmudgeon personality as a predictor of a broader set of job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational satisfaction, affective commitment) and employee well-being variables (i.e., job-related affective well-being, life satisfaction, physical health) than has been examined within prior research. And whereas prior research has relied solely upon self reports of criteria, we incorporate informant-reports of criteria to better explain the predictive validity of curmudgeon personality. Using 328 worker-informant pairs, we found that curmudgeon personality consistently predicted both self-reported and informant-reported criteria after the effects of more established personality traits (i.e., the Five Factor Model characteristics and trait affectivity) were controlled. These findings suggest that curmudgeon personality's may have important effects on the well-being of the person and these relationships are not simply the result of common-method bias. As such, curmudgeon personality may contribute unique insights into the dispositional basis of important outcomes.