oa The relationship and influence of personality dimensions on job stress among academic administrators at a research university

Academic administrators are an important group of people that 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. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship and the influence of personality dimensions on job stress in a sample of 120 (65 females and 55 males) academic administrators from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All participants were asked to complete The University Administrative Concern (Rasch 1986) and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised Short-Version (EPQR-S) (1985). Analysis of the data involved both descriptive and inferential statistics including Pearson's correlation coefficients and Mutiple Regression was used to determine the influence of personality on job stress. Results showed that 40% of the subjects experienced low stress level, 53.3% moderate and only 6.7% high level. 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 traits which were neuroticism and lie scale showed as good predictors of the level of job stress experienced by the academic administrators. The findings from this study provided some knowledge and understanding of the impact of administrative service on job stress experienced by academic administrators, which are crucial for implementing stress reduction strategies, because stress may reduce motivation and decrease in job performance especially in teaching.