Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Diﬀerences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid Proﬁles of teacher personality and relations with teacher self-eﬃcacy, work engagement, and job satisfaction Harsha N. Perera a,⁎,1 , Helena Granziera b,2 , Peter McIlveen c,3 a College of Education, University of Nevada Las Vegas, United States b School of Education, University of New South Wales, Australia c School of Linguistics, Adult, and Specialist Education, University of Southern Queensland, Australia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Personality proﬁles Teachers Big-Five Teacher self-eﬃcacy Work engagement Job satisfaction Latent proﬁle analysis Distal outcomes ABSTRACT This paper reports on research conducted to identify proﬁles of personality among teachers. We also examine the associations of proﬁle membership with dimensions of teachers' self-eﬃcacy for teaching, work engagement, and job satisfaction. Latent proﬁle analyses revealed four distinct proﬁles of teacher personality (i.e., “rigid”, “or- dinary”, “well-adjusted”, and “excitable”). Underpinning the validity of the proﬁles, results revealed that the dimensions of teacher self-eﬃcacy, work engagement, and job satisfaction diﬀered meaningfully across the proﬁles. Generally, well-adjusted teachers reported the highest levels on the outcomes. Notably, job satisfaction was lowest among excitable teachers. Equally noteworthy, ordinary and rigid teachers did not signiﬁcantly diﬀer on seven of the eight distal outcomes; only job satisfaction diﬀered signiﬁcantly between these proﬁles, with ordinary teachers reporting signiﬁcantly lower satisfaction. The ﬁndings provide novel evidence suggesting that models of teacher attrition, eﬀectiveness, or selection, should consider trait interactions rather than only ad- ditive eﬀects of personality. There is a bourgeoning interest in the role of teachers' personality in their work engagement and satisfaction (Duﬀy & Lent, 2009; Lent et al., 2011). This interest has been precipitated by a need to better under- stand the problem of teachers' attrition from, and intentions to leave, the profession, which have been attributed, in part, to low engagement and satisfaction with work (Klassen & Chiu, 2011; Martin, Sass, & Schmitt, 2012). Extant literature demonstrates that dispositional traits are associated with teachers' work engagement and job satisfac- tion both directly (Kokkinos, 2007; Lent et al., 2011) and indirectly via social-cognitive (e.g., teacher self-eﬃcacy) and behavioral (e.g., goal progress) mechanisms (Lent et al., 2011). However, this literature has been limited to addressing the additive eﬀects of personality traits on teachers' engagement and satisfaction as well as more proximal ante- cedents of these outcomes, such as self-eﬃcacy. Research shows that personality traits do not exist in isolation within individuals but co-exist at diﬀerent levels (Merz & Roesch, 2011). As such, a person-centered approach, permitting the identiﬁcation of homogenous proﬁles of tea- chers presenting qualitatively and quantitatively distinct combinations of personality traits, may be required for a holistic understanding of the role of personality in teacher outcomes. This research aims to extend the extant literature by investigating the way in which personality traits interact in teachers to inﬂuence substantively-important outcomes. Speciﬁcally, mixture analyses of Big-Five personality data are used to identify latent proﬁles of teacher personality. We then investigate whether the identiﬁed personality proﬁles diﬀer with respect to tea- chers' levels of self-eﬃcacy for teaching, work engagement, and job satisfaction. 1. Theoretical background Lent and Brown (2006) propose a social-cognitive model of work satisfaction, based on the social cognitive career theory, which provides a unifying framework for understanding the eﬀects of dispositional factors on self-eﬃcacy, engagement, and work satisfaction. From this perspective, work satisfaction is expected for those who (a) are engaged with and make progress at valued work-related goals, (b) experience or expect favorable work conditions, (c) believe they are capable of per- forming major work tasks, (d) perceive goal-and-eﬃcacy-relevant http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.08.034 Received 17 April 2017; Received in revised form 17 August 2017; Accepted 21 August 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Educational Psychology and Higher Education, College of Education, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Pkwy, Box 453003, Las Vegas, NV 89154-3003, United States. 1 Department of Educational Psychology and Higher Education, College of Education, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 2 School of Education, University of New South Wales Australia. 3 School of Linguistics, Adult & Specialist Education, University of Southern Queensland. E-mail address: Harsha.Perera@unlv.edu (H.N. Perera). Personality and Individual Differences 120 (2018) 171–178 0191-8869/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK