Personality and pay satisfaction: exploring the influence of organizational justice and gender in South Africa

This study contributes to the limited established empirical research on the impact and relevance of individual-level personality variables, specifically the broad dispositional trait, core self-evaluations, on the pay satisfaction of historically disadvantaged individuals. In light of recent inquiries which document the important causal role of personality attributes in the emergence of fairness perceptions, this study examines the mediating role of justice perceptions on the relationship between core self-evaluations and pay satisfaction. Using a sample of historically disadvantaged individuals from South Africa, our results show that organizational justice perceptions fully mediate the relationship between core self-evaluations and pay satisfaction. Furthermore, this study finds that gender moderates the relationship between core self-evaluations and pay satisfaction such that self-confident historically disadvantaged females are more satisfied with their pay than their male counterparts.