Who are the most engaged at work? A meta‐analysis of personality and employee engagement
verifiedmedium profile · Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2018
Young, Henry R.; Glerum, David R.; Wang, Wei; Joseph, Dana L.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
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Models this article informs
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In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
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.
What the literature says about it
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supports “Yet, our study, as well as previous research (Young et al., 2018), shows that complementary fit in these personality predictors explain a substantial amount of variance in employee engagement, meaning that much can be gained by increasing (for emotionality and proactive personality; Yang et al.”
supports “Results of a meta-analysis suggest that employee personality plays a substantial role in determining work engagement, in particular; positive affectivity, proactivity, conscientiousness, and extraversion (90).”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.1080/1359432x.2023.2250085
- 10.1080/1359432x.2019.1588887
- 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-053933
- 10.3389/fvets.2019.00138
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