Personality traits and basic psychological need satisfaction: Their relationship to apprentices’ life satisfaction and their satisfaction with vocational education and training

Highlights

• Apprentices distinguished between their need satisfaction in different contexts.

• Personality traits mainly predicted life satisfaction.

• Basic psychological need satisfaction mainly predicted context-specific outcome.

• Basic psychological need satisfaction predicted outcomes above personality traits.

Abstract

The present study investigated the role that personality traits and basic psychological need satisfaction (BPNS) play in apprentices’ satisfaction with vocational education and training (VET) and life satisfaction in two different contexts (the company and the vocational school). Drawing on a German sample of N = 2,477 apprentices in their first year of VET, BPNS in the two contexts could be differentiated between. Furthermore, the way in which BPNS and personality traits were related to VET satisfaction and life satisfaction varied between the two contexts; personality traits mainly predicted life satisfaction, whereas BPNS at the company mainly predicted VET satisfaction. Our results indicate that personality traits are particularly relevant for general outcomes, whereas BPNS is more related to context-specific outcomes.

Introduction

Alongside grades and income, an individual’s satisfaction is considered to be one of the most important aspects of academic and vocational success (Judge, Weiss, Kammeyer-Mueller, & Hulin, 2017; Ng, Eby, Sorensen, & Feldman, 2005; Shockley, Ureksoy, Rodopman, Poteat, & Dullaghan, 2016; Zhou, Sun, Guan, Li, & Pan, 2012). Satisfaction is understood as a sense of how well one is doing, for example, in life and work, and is a holistic measure of one’s progress, which is further related to a range of positive subjective and objective outcomes across various contexts (e.g., Amdurer, Boyatzis, Saatcioglu, Smith, & Taylor, 2014; Judge et al., 2017). Generally, satisfaction maximizes positive reinforcement, as satisfied individuals usually enjoy what they do and are, in consequence, more motivated to work in and learn in the corresponding environments. Conversely, satisfaction minimizes negative reinforcement (e.g., disengagement) and punishment (e.g., in the form of depression; Lubinski & Benbow, 2000). Satisfied individuals show better job performance over time (Alessandri, Borgogni, & Latham, 2017), are more committed to organizations (Azeem & Akhtar, 2014), are more likely to graduate within the regular time frame, are healthier (Faragher, Cass, & Cooper, 2005), and have lower turnover intention (Andrews, Kacmar, & Kacmar, 2014) than less satisfied individuals.

In the literature, different aspects of satisfaction are usually considered. Following Greenhaus and Kossek (2014), both work-related outcomes (job satisfaction or, in our case, satisfaction with vocational education and training [VET]) and work-unrelated outcomes (life satisfaction) are relevant when investigating career-related success. Thereby, high life satisfaction can be understood as being synonymous with positive mental health (e.g., Diener, 2000), while low life satisfaction has been shown to contribute to psychological states such as depression and to interpersonal problems (e.g., Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999; Fergusson et al., 2015). In addition to these rather global outcomes, it is also important to investigate apprentices’ VET satisfaction because low satisfaction can be detrimental to performance in VET and to the transition to a full-time occupation. As job satisfaction is considered to be one of the most effective indicators of vocational happiness (Zhang, Wu, Miao, Yan, & Peng, 2014), it is possible that low satisfaction with VET not only lowers the level of VET happiness; it may also be detrimental to future job satisfaction. Thus, it is important to identify the determinants of apprentices’ life and VET satisfaction.

Two major predictors that are assumed to be relevant for both aspects of satisfaction are personality traits and context-specific factors, such as the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (i.e., perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness; e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000; DeNeve & Cooper, 1998; Ryan & Deci, 2017). Research on personality traits and basic psychological needs is rooted in different traditions emphasizing different aspects of individual behavior. Personality research mainly deals with individual factors that are assumed to be relatively stable and that form the basis of behavioral patterns that are generalizable across situations (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Thus, personality traits are assumed to be related to academic and vocational success, regardless of the particular context (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991; McCrae & John, 1992). In contrast, the relation of basic psychological need satisfaction to academic and vocational success is inherently understood as depending on the particular context or working environment (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Deci & Ryan, 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2017). To investigate the different effects of such general (personality traits) versus context-specific (basic psychological need satisfaction) determinants, a sample is needed that simultaneously includes different contexts that are relevant for the same outcomes. Dual VET in Germany provides an excellent setting for such an investigation, as apprentices in this kind of VET both attend vocational school and work at a company.

Even though there has been quite a lot of research on the relation of both personality traits and basic psychological need satisfaction to vocational satisfaction, to the best of our knowledge, virtually no research so far has considered both determinants simultaneously in different contexts. However, such research is needed to further support the assumptions of generalizability and context-specificity for both constructs. In the present study, we investigated personality traits and basic psychological need satisfaction at the company and the vocational school as determinants of apprentices’ satisfaction. Thereby, we focused on two kinds of satisfaction that differ in their level of generalization: Life satisfaction refers to the global view of one’s life, whereas VET satisfaction refers to a specific context. In doing so, we first investigated whether the apprentices were able to differentiate between the basic psychological need satisfaction at school and at the company. Second, we investigated the contributions of personality traits (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and basic psychological need satisfaction (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Deci & Ryan, 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2017) to life and VET satisfaction.