International Journal of Management Sciences and Business Research, Nov-2015 ISSN (2226-8235) Vol-4, Issue 11 http://www.ijmsbr.com Page 1 Empirical Relationship of Big Five Personality Traits and Affective Commitment Among the Public Sector Employees. Author’s Details: (1) Aymen Asif (2) Dr Nighat Ansari & (3) Dr. Kashif Rathore - 1 Dissertation Scholar, Institute of Administrative Sciences, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan 2 & 3 Assistant Professor, Institute of Administrative Sciences, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan Abstract: The study explores the relationship of the Big-Five personality traits with affective commitment among the public sector employees. Personality is an important antecedent of employee commitment with the organization. Self-administered questionnaire assessing personality traits and affective commitment was collected from 150 managerial level of employee and academic level of the public sector employees. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive analysis and correlation analysis. The results of the study indicated that extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness traits were significantly correlated with affective commitment. Results on neuroticism and openness to experience traits did not show significant relationship. The findings of the study add to the body of knowledge in the refinement of organizational commitment models from dispositional perspective Keywords: Big Five Personality Traits; Affective Commitment; Organizational Commitment; Public Employees INTRODUCTION Organizations play a significant part in the economic progress of a state. Among all the assets of an organization, critical success factor is composed of its competent human resource. To achieve the objective of having competent manpower one of the essential parts of HRM, agreeing with Crowley (1999) and Johnson (2000), is to hire a right type of person with the right kind of personality who becomes committed to the organization. Personality appears to be a vital determining factor of employee performance in the organization. According to Scholl, there is something in individual personality or disposition that leads to exhibiting the committed behavior . Simply speaking, there are employees in an organization who want to remain in the organization. According to Meyer and Allen (1996) committed individuals have more chances to keep their jobs in the organization ; they show a higher level of employee engagement (Tanriverdi, 2008), job satisfaction and work motivation (Tella, Ayeni, & Popoola, 2007 ). Employees with lower level of commitment are linked with low levels of individual performance, lesser engagement with the work (DeCotiis & Summers, 1987) and inclined to leave the organization. Non-committed employee describes the organization in negative terms to other employees in the market which works to impede the organization‟s abilit y to attract and hire high quality human capital. In contrast, a high level of commitment among the workforce is more likely to produce social capital that help in creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization (Park & Rainey, 2007) and attract other employees in the market to be a part of that organization. Organizational commitment is considered a significant indicator of job attitude not only in the field of management and organizational behavior, but in human resource management as well because it predicts the turnover rate better than job satisfaction. Commitment as an individual attitude and behavior has been linked to other positive organizational behaviors like organizational citizenship behavior (Williams & Anderson, 1991), absenteeism and job involvement (Wegge, Schmidt, Parkes, & Dick, 2007) and turnover intentions (Jaros, 1997). In the management literature, organizational commitment has quite a long history (Becker, 1960). The idea of organizational commitment in the research can be mapped out through many aspects which include economic, social, psychological and behavioral perspective and the reality is that quite a lot of earlier authors described commitment in various manners which consist of several foundations, as dubbed by manifold indicators. Highly dedicated and committed human capital is not only a valued asset for the organization, but a competitive edge as well, which can be barely copied by the competitors in the market. Although researchers identified various antecedents, that are contributing towards organizational commitment. Significant attention has been given to environmental and structural factor while completely ignoring the dispositional factor that also play an important part in determining the organizational commitment among employees. Therefore the proposed research, aims to discover the relationship between personality traits and affective commitment and attempt to fill the gain the literature pertaining to antecedent of organizational commitment. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Big Five Personality Traits In the field of organizational behavior, Big Five model of personality is one of the most salient archetypal to test the personality of the employees (Goldberg, 1990; John & Srivastava, 1999). The five factor model is used to describe employee‟s independent personality types that constitute five comprehensive personality traits consisting Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience and Neuroticism. These five broad types of personality provide a useful taxonomy to test the individual differences among employee. Extraversion includes traits such as sociable, outgoing, aggressive and full of energy (Barrick & Mount, 1991). The second trait of personality which is mainly based on the individual‟s interpersonal relationship is called