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The purpose of this study was to assess personality traits, psychological fitness, and hardiness among conscript soldiers volunteering for international missions (n = 146), by comparing them with conscripts from the same year class and unit who did not apply for international missions (n = 275). The sample consisted of all mandatory enlisted soldiers assigned to a supply and maintenance regiment. There were no demographic differences between the groups. The volunteers reported greater stress tolerance, concern for others, extraversion, and self-confidence than the non-volunteers. There were no differences between the groups in orderliness, temper instability, or independence. Volunteers repeatedly reported greater psychological fitness for military missions and greater hardiness over the period of military service compared to the non-volunteers.

A professional military organization was introduced in Sweden in 2010. This means that the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) need to attract and employ soldiers, and to retain them within the organization. This scenario creates new types of challenges in manning the organization. The transition to an all-volunteer force puts job satisfaction in focus in order to retain personnel. This cross-sectional study of the relations between working conditions and job involvement among 300 recently employed soldiers showed that the dimensions of the Job Characteristics Model related significantly to job satisfaction and work motivation and (negatively) to turnover intentions from the SAF. The results further showed that all the critical psychological states contributed independently to the variance in the outcome variables.

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between, on one hand, personality and performance orientation and, on the other, job satisfaction and turnover intentions, using Barrick’s et al. theory of purposeful behavior. Using a questionnaire, data about job satisfaction, performance orientation and turnover intentions were collected from 300 newly recruited Swedish soldiers. A path analysis gave partial, but not full support to the assumptions behind the theory of purposeful behavior model. No relationships were found between the personality traits of emotional stability and conscientiousness, nor to either performance orientation or directly to job satisfaction. On the other hand, performance orientation showed a consistent relationship to perceived levels of the job characteristics, which mediated the path between the person-related variables and the outcome variables. Performance orientation also showed a strong direct relationship to general job satisfaction, which, in turn, was strongly related to turnover intentions.