The effects of organizational communication and personality traits on life satisfaction

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of organizational communication and personality traits on life satisfaction. Based on evaluating the positive experiences from personal perspective instead of organizational one, this is a pioneering and multidimensional study in terms of integrating new positive psychology approach to organizational communication area both theoreticaly and practicaly.This study employed the mixed model including descriptive model, relational model and comperative model within the context of the quantitative paradigm. The implementation phase was carried out at Anadolu University, having both hierarchical and flexible organizational structure which is important from the point of horizontal and vertical communication dimensions. Demographic Data Form, The Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (Downs & Hazen, 1977), Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue & Kentle, 1991), The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen & Griffin,1985), and Personal Wellbeing Index-A (International Wellbeing Group, 2006) have been employed as data collection instruments. Data were collected from a total of 245 academics. After excluding missing values and outliers, data for 233 academics were analysed.Results revealed that the level of organizational communication satisfaction and life satisfaction was above to mean point of the questionnaires. There was a significant and strong relationship between organizational communication and life satisfaction. In predicting life satisfaction, organizational communication satisfaction was a more powerful predictor than personality and demographic data. Organizational communication differs according to status, working year, graduation year, marital status of academics whereas life satisfaction differs according to number of children in addition to these demografic factors.Organizational integration, media quality and communication with superiors were the most satisfied factors whereas feedback is the least satisfied factor of organizational communication. Organizational communication satisfaction explained 18% of variance in life domains satisfaction and 10% in general life satisfaction. Emotional stability explains additional variance in life satisfaction. When organizational communication satisfaction grouped categorically and its interactions with life satisfaction analyzed, a lineer relationship was found; that is, as organizational communication increased, life satisfaction also increased.There are many implications of the findings. The effect of the positive organizational practices on the whole life of a person supports the ?spill-over? approach focusing on enlighting the relationship between organizational life and non-organizational life. Because organizational communication satisfactions? relationship with life satisfaction in this research is higher than its relationship with job satisfaction reported in the literature, it brings up that more person-oriented approaches should be adopted substituting job oriented approaches. The integration of human-based life satisfaction approach with organizational satisfaction has the potential to achieve both organizational and individual objectives.Keywords: Organizational communication satisfaction, life satisfaction, happiness, positive psychology, positive communication.