Building Employee Engagement with Personality Assessments
Dr Isaac Baker
perswaydlaunch.com – your solution to stubborn influence and behaviour change challenges. December's waitlist is full, but we're still accepting applicants to Q1 2025's launch waitlist.
[Spoiler: Positive, optimistic, hard-working, and outgoing individuals tend to be more engaged.]
In business, we value and aspire to building an engaged workforce. Often, we target our attention to target environmental and contextual solutions to improve engagement. This is reasonable course of action, though it may not offer the full picture of engagement.
Importantly, we should also recognise the role of individual qualities (e.g., personality traits) in predicting how engaged people are likely to be.
We can think of these individual difference qualities as establishing a baseline level of engagement that can interact with environmental and contextual influences to drive increases or decreases in engagement.
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A Meta-Analysis
I recently came across a meta-analysis [analysis of many studies on a specific research question] on personality and engagement, revealing interesting and impactful findings on this topic.
The paper examined the relationship between personality traits and employee engagement. Using a 114 independent samples, totalling 44,224 participants, they found personality traits accounted for ~48% of variance in engagement.
In other words, personality traits are strong predictors of engagement. In more words, knowing something about an individual's personality traits can give a fair idea of how likely they are to be engaged in the workforce, independent of contextual factors.
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Most important (strongest) personality predictors of engagement:
- Positive affect
- Proactivity
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
Positive, optimistic, hard-working, and outgoing individuals tend to be more engaged.
Least important (weakest) personality predictors of engagement:
- Neuroticism
- Negative affect
- Agreeableness
- Openness to experience
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Implications
- It is possible to build a more engaged workforce by using personality assessments during the selection process?
Questions for you:
- Should we?
- What impact (if any) should this have for you?
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Share your thoughts.
#engagement #personality #assessment #selection #employee #workforce #hr #success #behaviour #business #organisations #psychology #metaanalysis