Driving Employee Engagement Through Five Personality Traits: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

An attempt has been tried to explore the personality factors in predicting employee engagement among the middle-level employees in the IT industry. Based on an empirical investigation of 383 middle-level employees working in IT firms, the researcher cognizes their perception of various personality-related factors extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The present study was exploratory in nature. A variance-based structural equation model (SEM) approach was adopted for the measurement of the model. The study confirmed that personality-related factors extraversion, conscientiousness neuroticism, and openness to experience significantly related to employee engagement. In addition to this extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience significantly predicted employee engagement, contrary, the insignificant effect was seen of agreeableness on employee engagement. Grounded to this study, it is strongly recommended that individual possess the extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness qualities seen to be more engaged in their job while agreeableness person is seen to be less engaged. The corporate entity herein suggested that to keep the talented and valuable employees, must strategically think about these factors. To the best of my belief, this is the first and foremost article that address the personality-related factors in predicting employee engagement in the Indian context.