Want an engaged workforce? Hire cheerful people!

Simon Albrecht from Deakin University and myself recently had the good news that the International Journal of Human Resources will publish an article of ours (Albrecht and Marty, 2017) on characteristics which drive employee engagement. 

We discovered a range of very valuable findings, which I will write on in future posts, but one of my favourites was the fact that a significant driver of the levels of engagement of employees is a personality characteristic called “liveliness”. When a person scores high in liveliness this means that they are dispositionally cheerful, chirpy and optimistic. 

Engagement is a great thing to have in your workforce – it is an excellent predictor of a whole bunch of valuable outcomes, including client satisfaction and commercial sustainability. The key message is that if you hire people who are inclined to focus on the positive they are likely to be personally more resilient and to “infect” their colleagues with positivity. 

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? You can recruit for higher levels of engagement. In fact, on our psychological assessment platform we predict the levels of engagement of prospective employees based on a mathematical model derived from this research. Click here to find out more.

Albrecht, S.L and Marty, A.F., (2017) Personality, self-efficacy and job resources as predictors of employee engagement, affective commitment and turnover intentions. International Journal of Human Resource Management, (in press).