Abstract
This paper investigates the link between personality traits and workers’ productivity when working from home. We exploit a survey providing measures of the “Big Five” personality traits for more than 1700 recent teleworkers, run in Latvia in 2021. Other things equal, Conscientiousness is positively associated with reporting higher productivity for working from home. Moreover, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience are positively linked with willingness to work from home post-pandemic. These results suggest that pro-teleworking employers will observe positive selection on personality traits into their workforce. On the other hand, the link between Extraversion and preference for teleworking is negative. Our findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all policy is unlikely to maximize neither firms’ productivity nor workers’ satisfaction.
