Relationships Between Big Five Personality Traits and Three Dimensions of Employee Engagement

Date of Award

Summer 2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Committee Chair

Michelle Geiman

Committee Member

Beverly Smith

Committee Member

Brenda Jones

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations around the world began encouraging the maximization of telework opportunities. As a result of this increased shift in working environments, managerial staff developed concerns associated with how the personality traits of current and future employees might impact their job engagement levels. This research study uses the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, to predict how engaged employees are in cognitive, emotional, and physical dimensions of employee engagement. Even when the pandemic declared to be over, managers within the education, healthcare, and government industries (among many others) continue to grapple with what may become the “new normal” for the modern-day workforce. A quantitative approach was used to design a survey that incorporated a combination of the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Job Engagement Scale (JES) and was deployed for data collection among various professional organizations. The findings of this study suggest positive correlations between the five personality traits and the three dimensions of employee engagement. The results of all five research questions indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between the dependent and independent variables, ultimately concluding that openness has a positive correlation with cognitive engagement, conscientiousness has a positive correlation with cognitive engagement, extraversion has a positive correlation with physical engagement, agreeableness has a positive correlation with cognitive engagement, and low neuroticism has a positive correlation with emotional engagement.

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