Influence of Big Five Personality Model on Propensity to Complain – A case of dormitory

The importance of complaining behavior has been discovered long ago, and the attention from only 1970s had been mainly considered (Fornell and Westbrook, 1979). Unsatisfied individuals who express their feelings and thoughts, experience significant elevation in satisfaction when they assess products or services compared those who do not comment. Research done by scholars leave evidence showing that distinguishing the difference between attitudinal complain and propensity to complain is relevantly a difficult task (Susskind, 2006). Scholars have suggested that when individuals complain there are factors influencing this behavior. These major factors are categorized as personal, culture and situational. The personal factors had been studied by scholars for years and the outcome have asserted the fact that personality traits are key determinant driving this behavior (Fornell and Westbrook, 1979; Jacoby and Jaccard, 1981; Richins, 1983; Singh, 1990; Harris and Mowen, 2001; Phau and Sari, 2004; Bodey and Grace, 2007; Grougio and Pettigrew, 2009; Sharma et al., 2010; Ekinci et al., 2016). In this study Big Five personality traits model is examined and the relevant instruments are used to probe the students in Eastern Mediterranean University of North Cyprus propensity to complain. Given this aim, there are several objectives than can be hypothesized as outcomes of this study. Data collection was conducted among 385 students from EMU dormitories in campus area. In total five hypotheses are proposed to be tested in this thesis. Based on the study and exhausted hypotheses, it is concluded that students with personality traits of Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability has relatively positive and negative tendency on propensity to complain. The content of findings were included in this thesis followed by discussion about the objectives of the study from the findings. Nonetheless, similar to any social science research, limitations and future implementations of this research were also exhausted in the final chapter. Keywords: Agreeableness, Big Five Personality Traits, Complaining Behavior, Personality, Conscientiousness, Day and Landon, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Introversion, Openness to Experience, Propensity to Complain.