Impact of Employees’ Personality Traits on Openness to Change: The Case of Eskişehir Restaurants

Abstract

Today, there are changes in competition, information technologies, society’s lifestyles, customer expectations and needs. If any firm wants to stay strong in this changing world, it needs to be able to adapt to change. In order for the firm to be through with the change successfully, employees need to support the change. Also, in the service industry such as restaurants, it is crucial that personality traits of employees are open to change to change, for the change to be more efficient and effective. Although there are studies on change and personality traits in literature, there seems to be none correlating these with the openness to change of restaurant employees’ personality traits. For this reason, the aim of this study is to examine the impact of restaurant employees’ personality traits on openness to change through those located in Eskişehir city. The data were applied to 450 employees in Eskişehir restaurants using the questionnaire technique and 397 questionnaires which are accepted to be applicable were analyzed. Quantitative research methods were used in the analysis of the obtained data. "Openness to Change Scale" and "Big Five Personality Inventory" which were tested for reliability and validity, were used to collect the research data. In the analysis of the data, t-test, correlation analysis, one-way analysis of variance and simple linear regression analysis were applied. As a result of the study, no significant relationship was found between the demographic characteristics of the participants and openness to change. The simple linear regression analysis resulted that, in general, there exists a positive effect of the personality inventory on the change in openness. It is determined that openness to change is negatively correlated with the neuroticism dimension of the personality inventory, whereas it is positively correlated with openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness dimensions.