In the 21st century, the rapidly changing environment’s challenges and transitions in the workplace and society are becoming increasingly common. In this context, organizations are pushed to compete effectively and strive to provide a healthy environment where their employees can flourish. Hence, organizations prefer to hire those employees who can adapt and actively perform in changing environments and eventually enhance corporate performance considering their will to make a decision where necessary and given the authority (Masten, 2014). Moreover, positive relationships of organizational employees improve the well-being of the workplace, which leads to sustainable organizations. Therefore, to identify competent employees at the workplace, organizations seek help from the Big Five personality trait model and their emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence has emerged as a potential platform and source for developing sustainable organizations (Di Fabio, 2017). Emotional intelligence encompasses intrapersonal knowledge of an individual, self-motivation, understanding of one’s emotions and management of them, including interpersonal awareness of others’ emotions and respect for their feelings (Chirumbolo et al., 2019). Emotional intelligence can explain some of the remaining variances in predicting work performance and career success, which traditional intelligence has not explained. Employees with high emotional intelligence are better at detecting stress-related feelings and regulating their emotions to decrease it. They can also design strategies to cope with the negative effects of stress. It can be argued that creating a pleasant workplace relational environment would undoubtedly help employees polish their attributes that contribute to their well-being and lead to the development of a sustainable organization through effective decision making.

Personality determines an individual’s behavior and influences their performance at the workplace. The Big Five personality model characterized individual personalities and is globally the most acceptable personality model. Personalities of the individuals have been categorized into five major categories namely: agreeableness, openness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness (Teh et al., 2011; Templer, 2012; Kaur and Anand, 2018; Abdellaoui et al., 2019; Dholariya, 2019). It has been acknowledged that key personality traits expressed in the Big Five personality model have a strong association with a wide range of human behaviors (Keefer et al., 2018). Employees with different personality traits behave accordingly; for example, extrovert employees are more active in workplace social networks while conscientious employees have more positive feelings about their workplace (Sutin et al., 2010).

Prior researchers have studied the relationship between Big Five personality traits and emotional intelligence in different contexts (Vesely et al., 2013; Di Fabio and Saklofske, 2014; Luz Martín-Peña et al., 2018; Herrera et al., 2019). These studies conclude that the Big Five personality model includes conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, and extraversion strongly associated with emotional intelligence.

The main objective of this study is to examine the role of the Big Five model of personality in employees’ emotional intelligence and its consequential role in the digital entrepreneurial behavior of the employees, which contributes to organizational success. This study aims to understand the fundamental questions related to the emotional intelligence of employees, such as:

The current study will measure the role of Big Five personality traits in the employees’ emotional intelligence working at the managerial level and how their emotional intelligence factor fosters their attitude toward entrepreneurial behavior. In the next sections of the paper, the literature of concerned variables is reviewed, followed by the methodology and data analysis. The paper is concluded with future recommendations and the limitations of the study.

The current study follows the quantitative approach with the survey method for data collection. Since this study is about measuring the effects of personality traits mentioned in the Big Five model of personality on emotional intelligence and consequently on digital entrepreneurship behavior, the philosophy followed is post-positivist. The theories have been devised based on the literature, and hypotheses are formed to reach certain conclusions. Therefore, a deductive approach of research is followed. Further, the hypotheses were tested for their approval and rejection based on the data collected from the sample selected. The population frame used in this study was made up of student employees at middle-level management in the mainland in China. The data obtained were checked for reliability and validities and then further run on SmartPLS software 3.3. The results obtained were used to reach the acceptance and rejection of the hypotheses of the study, as given in Figures 3, 4.

The sample was selected through convenience sampling because reaching out to all the population was not feasible considering a large strength of employees in the corporate sector. Hence, the sample size taken in this study was 260 which is considered a good sample size. We distributed the questionnaire to 292 employees and 260 were reliable to estimate the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis. The rest were screened out due to maintaining the reliability of the analysis. The unit of analysis is the employees from the corporate sector in the mainland in China. The data collection is done through a structured questionnaire and a survey technique was employed. The respondents were informed about the survey beforehand, appointments were taken, and the questionnaires were filled right away to avoid ambiguity in understanding items. All the measurements are considered from previously well-known and accepted studies. The data collected from the sample was then used in the SmartPLS software for the structural equation modeling.

This analysis is based on the SEM, a two-stage estimation in Smart Partial Least Square (SmartPLS). The SEM analysis has two sequential steps, including estimating the measurement model and structural model. Both of these steps share different purposes. Measurement model estimation aims to estimate the reliability and validity of constructs and the items. This step also usually has the measurements of convergent validity and discriminant validity. The reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity are measured through Cronbach alpha and construct’s reliability, AVE values, factor loadings, Fornell and Larcker ratio, and HTMT ratio. This step helps the estimation process to analyze the reliability of constructs that are in the research model. The summary of demography is mentioned in Table 1.

Table 1 illustrates the summary of respondents in this research. The questionnaire of the research included four demographical questions. Overall, the outcomes of empirical details demonstrated that males and females have equally participated in the survey thus, there are no such biases in the outcome of the research, which are 48 and 52%, respectively. Moreover, around 73% of respondents believe that the Big Five personality traits are important to understand the personality and its effect on emotional intelligence.

The first stage of SEM analysis is the measurement model. This study considered the Cronbach alpha and Construct Reliability (CR) to estimate the reliability of all constructs in the model. All the values of Cronbach alpha and CR are above the threshold of 0.70 (Huo et al., 2020; Lia et al., 2020). Thus the reliability of all six constructs is satisfied thus reliable to use. The factor loadings measure the items or individual measurements reliability to measure the distinct construct, and it must be greater than 0.70 (Hair et al., 2017). Thus all items of each contract are above the threshold thus, items are reliable. Afterward, the AVE values are also above the threshold of 0.50 (Hair et al., 2017) and all values above 0.50 demonstrated the discriminant validity. Thus, the convergent validity is maintained, and all constructs and their items are reliable and converted to measure the construct. All the outcome coefficients are illustrated in Table 2.

However, respondents believe that all big traits are equally important, but the extraversion trait is found less important based on the respondent’s details. Afterward, more than 86% of people believe that these five traits describe individuals’ overall behavior, and 75% respond that these traits can alter individuals’ emotional intelligence. Secondly, the structural model assessment estimated the causal relationship between the variables in this case; this stage will produce the statistical significance of paths or relationship between the Big Five personality traits and emotional intelligence. This study considered SmartPLS 3.3.3. on 5000 sub-sample in algorithm and bootstrapping estimation stages.

The discriminant validity is measured through the Fornell and Larcker criterion of correlation and the HTMT (Heterotrait-Monotrait) Ratio (Hair et al., 2017). Both measures are used to measure the discriminant validity of the constructs. These two tests are used to measure if there is any case of multicollinearity. If the values of the HTMT ration (according to Franke and Sarstedt, 2019) are below 0.90, these results indicate that the variables in the study are discriminantly valid and do not have any impact on each other. Since this study showed all the diagonal values above the below values, the discriminant validity is maintained, and it showed that there is no such issue of higher correlation. It implies that items of concerning variables cannot discriminate with each other thus are unable to satisfy the discriminant validity. The results for Fornell and Larcker criterion were illustrated in Tables 3, 4.

The second part of the analysis measured the structural model assessment. The structural model assessment is related to the understanding of the casual relationship. Structural models are validated by computing beta (β), R², and corresponding t-values using a bootstrapping methodology based on a 5000 resampling. The structural model assessment results are illustrated in Table 5. Start with the first hypothesis (H₁) the agreeableness does not predict the emotional intelligence with t−statistic = 1.186thus H₁ confirmed statistically insignificant relationship. Secondly, the second trait of the Big Five models is consciousness. Consciousness meaningfully predicts emotional intelligence as consciousness has a positive significant impact on emotional intelligence under t−statistic = 3.343:p−value = 0.000 therefore H₂ is also confirmed. Thirdly, the extraversion trait also meaningfully predicts the emotional intelligence among employees as the p-values and t-statistics imply a significant relationship between these constructs as t−statistic = 8.712:p−value = 0.000 so H₃ is also accepted. Fourth, the H₄ was rejected since it did not demonstrate that neuroticism does not have a significant positive impact on emotional intelligence as t−statistic = 1.017:p−value = 0.310. Finally, the last trait, openness also demonstrated a positive and significant impact on emotional intelligence as t−statistic =  2.974:p−value = 0.003. Emotional intelligence also showed the most powerful impact on digital entrepreneurial behavior t−statistic = 38.763:p−value = 0.000 thus accepting the mediating role of emotional intelligence H₆.

Big Five personality traits are a source of emotional intelligence these days (Di Fabio and Saklofske, 2021). This study has explored the exogenous effect of the Big Five personality traits model on employees’ emotional intelligence in Chinese settings. The Five – factors personality theory provides a straightforward framework for comprehending others and enhancing relationships by understanding why individuals behave the way people do. Several psychologists now consider that the five personality traits are biologically based as well as universally accepted. These personal attributes represent the most significant elements that define our social environment. The discussion part compares and contrasts the findings of the current study with the earlier literature. Therefore, the below discussion emphasizes the current findings of research with previous literature.

This study considered the parallel relationship from Kappagoda (2013). The study’s findings and interpretations are based on the measurement and structural models obtained from the structural equation modeling. As a preliminary step, the data obtained from the respondents were checked for reliability. The reliabilities obtained in this study were above 0.8, and the AVE for the variables was above the cut-off value of 0.5 (Sarstedt et al., 2019). Similarly, the Fornell and Larcker criterion and HTMT ratios gave the values that meet the acceptability criteria for these two tests (see Tables 3, 4). The hypotheses of the study developed from the literature were measured using the path model. The results obtained can be seen in Table 5.

Overall, this research demonstrated that out of five personality traits, three personality traits demonstrated a positive association with emotional intelligence, however, previously it has been found that emotional intelligence also meaningfully correlated with the Big Five personality traits (Avsec et al., 2009; Aydogmus, 2016; Boyd and Pennebaker, 2016; Obschonka et al., 2017; Antoñanzas, 2020; El Othman et al., 2020). Day et al. (2005) concluded that emotional intelligence has a significant association with extraversion, openness, and agreeableness in particular, and no significant association was found between neuroticism and consciousness. The previous research findings strongly defend and strengthen our research findings because few personality traits may not have a significant relationship with emotional intelligence as in current authors found a non-significant association of agreeableness and neuroticism with emotional intelligence. This factor may be prevailed due to different cultural aspects, values, and norms thus produced different results.

According to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to consider the direct effect of the Big Five personality traits individually on emotional intelligence as mediating variable and digital entrepreneurship as the dependent variable. This study investigated the direct effect of the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and consciousness) on employees’ emotional intelligence in Chinese settings. If seen individually, agreeableness could not find significant results in this study which is in contradiction with the previous studies (Aydogmus, 2016; Jonason et al., 2017; Soto, 2019; Urquijo et al., 2019) this is because people higher on agreeableness tend to please others as much as they can which drives them away from their emotional intelligence (Obschonka et al., 2017). The first rejected hypothesis implies that emotionally less intelligent employees can agree with people’s opinions on different points and fail to manage their own emotions compared to those who are high on the power of acceptance and agreeableness. As for conscientiousness, it has found significant results regarding their positive impact on emotional intelligence, which is in adherence with the studies conducted in the past (Day et al., 2005; Hudani et al., 2012; Aydogmus et al., 2015; Antoñanzas, 2020; El Othman et al., 2020). Secondly, the conscientiousness of employees tend to have a thoughtful mind, mindful and much organized than unconscious employees son the workplace. Therefore, people those have consciousness personality trait often are emotionally intelligent and protectively manage their work activities.

Furthermore, extraversion also found a significant positive impact on emotional intelligence, supported by the past findings of Day et al. (2005). Extraversion may not influence emotional intelligence in Chinese settings. It may be because of the introverted personalities of Chinese employees. This fact is also demonstrated in demographic details that extraversion may not be an important personality trait according to respondents. Neuroticism in this study could not find significance in emotional intelligence. These findings follow (Sandhu et al., 2009; Alghamdi et al., 2017) because negative vibes do not add to the emotional intelligence but rather wear off. The positive association of neuroticism with emotional intelligence describes that Chinese employees are experiencing a lot of stress. Lastly, the finding regarding the openness to experience have also been aligned with the past research of Carmeli et al. (2009) who found that individuals with high openness to experience are more prone to emotional intelligence. Finally, the openness also demonstrated a positive association that meaningfully explains that employees are open to learning new skills and competence are emotionally intelligent. Therefore, employees with these traits are emotionally intelligent and effective at the workplace (Kappagoda, 2013; Antoñanzas, 2021; Di Fabio and Saklofske, 2021). The last hypothesis of the study about emotional intelligence playing a role in digital entrepreneurial behavior has been in line with the past researches (Obschonka et al., 2017; Elia et al., 2020) who found that emotional intelligence has been a key contributor to the entrepreneurial activities and behaviors of individuals. This is because the individuals higher on EI tend to appear stronger for decision making and hence contribute to the entrepreneurial activities. The ultimate interest of this study was to check the role of emotional intelligence in bridging the relationship of personality traits and the digital entrepreneurial behavior. There have been very less studies considering the changing demands of the entrepreneurship taking into account the emotional intelligence. Hence, this study has tried to empirically check these relationships among the variables of interest. It has been found that emotional intelligence very significantly and strongly predicts the digital entrepreneurial behaviors. The findings of this study endorse the previous studies (Zampetakis et al., 2009; Taleghani et al., 2013; Obschonka et al., 2017).

The Big Five personality model has been found to have great significance in improving emotional intelligence of individuals. This study has investigated the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and the emotional intelligence and consequently on the entrepreneurial behaviors among employees in China. The study has found a partial role of Big Five model of personality on emotional intelligence not finding significant results for agreeableness and neuroticism. Moreover, emotional intelligence has positively and significantly predicted the digital entrepreneurial behavior of employees in China. The results signify the importance of exploiting opportunities available to the middle-level employees in progressing in their fields. These findings are important for human resource specialists and other top management stakeholders to understand the employee’s behavior. The results suggest that employees in the China should be given opportunities according to their job descriptions to exploit their full potential. Moreover, it also highlights the potential importance of personality traits in terms of emotional intelligence because it supports employees in effectively managing work activities at the workplace.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethical approval for this study and written informed consent from the participants of the study were not required following local legislation and national guidelines.

YD and AA: initial draft and methods. SC and PC: revision and supervision. AN and MH: analysis and interpretation. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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