Do Personality Traits Matter for Work Performance? A survey of University Librarians

Personality traits are core characteristics of individuals and have been recognized as the most important elements for developing a unique and promising personality. It plays an important role to enhance the work performance of individuals. Therefore, the study intends to investigate the impact of personality traits on work performance of university librarians. For this purpose, a survey based questionnaire was used to collect data from 221 university librarians from public and private sector universities of Pakistan selected by census sampling. Major findings showed that mostly university librarians owned the personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. They were polite, supportive, trusting, responsible, careful, creative, and achievement-oriented. They also liked to be the center of the attention in social gatherings, they felt others’ emotions and feelings. Further, they performed their work related tasks well in time by managing the things at work effectively and efficiently The impact of personality traits was found positive and correlated with work performance, however, the relationship of neuroticism was found less strong with conscientiousness, open to experience, and IWP. The findings of this research would help university librarians overcome the issues in their personalities so that they could bring productive outcomes to their institutes and deliver quality of services to users. The pinnacle was to enhance the performance of university librarians by enriching their personality characteristics