Personality and Attitudes Towards Risk as Predictors of Career Success and Labour Market Outcomes

The thesis makes several distinct contributions to the existing literature. First, it contributes to the careers literature by highlighting the importance of occupational prestige as a driver of life satisfaction. Second, the thesis contributes to the career literature by providing new evidence on how personality traits influence objective and subjective measures of career success, including pay, job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Third, the thesis introduces employees' willingness to take risks as an added driver of career success. The empirical analysis shows that willingness to take risk has a positive effect on pay and life satisfaction, even after controlling for personality traits. Therefore, it emerges that although risk attitude is correlated with personality traits, it exerts an independent influence on earnings and life satisfaction. In contrast, there is no evidence that willingness to take risks is associated, in a statistical sense, with job satisfaction, although personality does. The thesis also contributes directly to the labour economics and entrepreneurship fields by considering individuals' willingness to take risks in the context of performance-related pay (PRP) and their decision to pursue hybrid entrepreneurship as a career choice. Most of the existing empirical studies treat risk attitude as an unobservable individual trait. The analysis in this thesis exploits unique information on individuals' willingness to take risks, which is available in the UKHLS, to revisit how PRP impacts on productivity and other labour market outcomes. In addition, the thesis contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by using personality traits to analyse empirically individuals' decision to engage in hybrid entrepreneurship. Although previous work in entrepreneurship has explored personality traits as drivers of entrepreneurial ventures, little evidence exists demonstrating research on whether personality influences individuals' choice of hybrid entrepreneurship. Hybrid entrepreneurship is often considered a stepping-stone towards entrepreneurship for individuals who are not prepared to aim for such a venture on a full-time basis straight away. Openness to new experiences is associated with high levels of life satisfaction for those individuals who follow hybrid entrepreneurship as an alternative form of employment. Finally, the thesis supports the social comparison theory, dispositional theory and flow theory. Individuals determine their own social status based on how they stack up against others in order to gain evaluations about their skills and abilities. In dispositional theory traits are relatively stable and show individual heterogeneity. The last theory to include in this thesis is flow theory. Flow theory has documented to improve performance and self-esteem. This work identifies how this is applied in performance-related schemes.