Effects of the Big Five personality traits on tipping attitudes, motives, and behaviors / Michael Lynn.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 9-10).

Knowledge about the personality predictors of tipping attitudes, motives, and behaviors could shed light on the psychological processes underlying tipping and might allow service workers to better predict and manage their tip incomes. To those ends, analyses of online survey data revealed numerous direct and indirect (through tipping motives) Big Five personality trait effects on tipping attitudes and behavior. For example, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness affected tipping likelihood and tip sizes through its enhancement of intrinsic tipping motives. Also, the effects of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism on leaving sub-normative (<15%) or normative (15%–20%) restaurant tips were independent of the traits’ relationships with self-reported tipping motives. However, the sizes of these and other personality effects were small, so there is little to be gained from using customer’s personalities to predict their tipping behavior.