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Who are the most engaged at work? A meta‐analysis of personality and employee engagement
Author(s) -
Young Henry R.,
Glerum David R.,
Wang Wei,
Joseph Dana L.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.2303
Subject(s) - agreeableness , psychology , negative affectivity , conscientiousness , extraversion and introversion , personality , work engagement , neuroticism , positive affectivity , openness to experience , big five personality traits , social psychology , hierarchical structure of the big five , employee engagement , variance (accounting) , work (physics) , management , mechanical engineering , economics , business , accounting , engineering
Summary In order to identify the employees who are most likely to be engaged in their work, we conducted a meta‐analysis of 114 independent samples ( N = 44,224) to provide estimates of the relationship between eight personality traits and employee engagement. Results indicated that these personality traits explained 48.10% of the variance in engagement. Supporting energy management theories, relative weights analysis revealed that positive affectivity was by far the strongest predictor of engagement (31.10% of the explained variance; ρ = .62), followed by proactive personality (19.60%; ρ = .49), conscientiousness (14.10%; ρ = .39), and extraversion (12.10%; ρ = .40), whereas neuroticism, negative affectivity, agreeableness, and openness to experience were the least important. We highlight the importance of positive affectivity for engagement and support personality‐based selection as a viable means for organizations to build a highly engaged workforce. Implications for using personality assessment to select engaged employees are discussed.