Big Five personality profiles and their association with job crafting among service sector employees

Abstract Existing literature on personality and job crafting has mostly used variable-centered methods. Drawing on Five-Factor Theory, we took a person-centered perspective to examine how Big Five configurations relate to job crafting (JC) in the service sector. Trait-level latent profile analysis (LPA) identified four profiles: Robust, Adaptive, Sociable but scattered, and Vulnerable, that resembled canonical Big Five families. A facet-level LPA largely reproduced these same families with modest refinement rather than new structures. The profiles differed in overall job crafting and its task, relational, and cognitive dimensions; more adaptive trait constellations, especially the Robust profile, reported more crafting overall, whereas the Vulnerable profile reported the least. Concordance between the personality and crafting profile systems was above chance, but modest. Overall, the findings are consistent with a person-centered view in which personality configuration relates to job crafting probabilistically rather than uniformly, and they may inform more tailored support for crafting. As the sample was voluntary and drawn from a limited set of organizations, the results should be replicated.