A study of the Relationship and Influence of Personality on Job Stress among Academic Administrators at a University

In universities academic administrators are an important group of people that provides leadership to the universities. They hold multiple administrative positions in addition to their teaching responsibilities, which increases their workload. Ignoring their well-being could be detrimental to the individual as well as to the organization as a whole. This study was conducted among 120 (55 males and 65 females) academic administrators of the National University of Malaysia with the purpose of studying the relationship and influence of personality on job stress. Two instruments used which were Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised Short-Version (EPQR-S) (1985), and The University Administrative Concern, Rasch (1986), all of which have good validity of between 0.6 to 0.9. To examine the relationship Pearson Correlation was used, while the Mutiple Regression was used to determine the influence of personality on job stress. Results of the study revealed that there was a significant relationship between personalities with work –related stress. Next, the results revealed that there is a meaningful positive correlation between job stress and psychoticism (r=0.17) and neuroticism (r=0.38), and a meaningful negative correlation was found between job stress and extraversion (r= - 0.26) and lie (r= - 0.25). However, only two of the personality dimensions which were neuroticism and lie scale showed as good predictors of job stress. Our results suggest that better knowledge of the influence of personality dimensions and job stress might be helpful for the choice of more effective interventions.