Personality and job engagement among municipal workers in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa

Abstract

Orientation: Although researchers have discovered many of the beneficial and positive consequences of job engagement, little is known about the multitude of antecedent factors that lead to employee engagement such as personality.Research purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between the big five personality traits and job engagement among municipal workers.Motivation for the study: The motivation of this study is to examine the relationship between personality and psychological conditions. It was premised on previous research that personality is associated with many employees’ behaviours.Research approach/design and method: The present study employed a quantitative, cross-sectional research design by using a questionnaire on a sample of 403 district municipal workers in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa.Main findings: The study findings show that openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness had a positive relationship with job engagement, whereas neuroticism has a negative relationship with job engagement. Municipalities and educational qualifications had an impact of job engagement.Practical/managerial implications: The study recommends managers to switch from an intervention-based focus to a selection-based focus as municipalities can maximise their resources by being able to better predict job success early in the selection process as opposed to trying to maximise the performance on a continual basis through interventions.Contribution/value-add: This study adds to an understanding of the influences of personality on work outcomes such as job engagement, giving areas for exploration in coaching or feedback interviews based on personality assessment.

The relationship between public service employees’ personal resources and psychological well-being

“…Efficient service delivery in stressful public sector environments depends on employee performance (Mhlanga et al, 2019). Van de Walle et al (2015) found that opportunities to help others and contribute to society draw individuals into public service.…”

“…Efficient service delivery in stressful public sector environments depends on employee performance (Mhlanga et al., 2019). Van de Walle et al.…”

The Role of the Big Five Personality Profiles in Employee Affective Commitment and Engagement: Case of Small and Medium Enterprises

“…Although agreeableness had scored as poor on the reliability test while having a weak statistically significant relationship with affective commitment, it was the only predictor, alongside Conscientiousness, that had a moderately significant relationship with employee engagement. It was concluded in a study (Shaban, 2018) that agreeableness and openness to experience were found out to be significant, while in another study (Mhlanga et al, 2019), agreeableness, together with Conscientiousness and openness to experience, represented the most variance. Additionally, in another study (Shukla, Aggarwal, Adhikari, & Singh, 2014), it was found that Conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience had a moderately significant relationship, whereas extraversion and neuroticism had a weak and significant relationship.…”

“…Hence, the hypotheses and sub-hypotheses were firstly tested with Pearson's r (Ashton & Lee, 2009;Yamagata et al, 2006) to investigate whether there is a correlation between the variables. Afterward, to determine the relationship between the hypotheses, linear regressions (Mhlanga, Mjoli, & Chamisa, 2019;Sev, 2019;Shaban, 2018) were used as shown in Table 3 and Table 4 below…”

Professional attributes of young specialists: expectations of municipal employees in rural areas

“…In our opinion, this statement is also very relevant for municipal employees of rural areas, who in their professional practices are faced with complex socio-economic issues: environmental management, a lower standard of living in comparison with the city, the availability of high-quality services in education, medicine, culture, social and psychological stress and dissatisfaction of the rural population with life. To overcome these situations, leaders are needed with certain personal qualities and a high level of labor motivation [4] and capable of involving the local community in positive transformations [5,6,7]. The authors of Gyensare M. A., Kumedzro L. E., Sanda, A., Boso N. also speak about the relevance of this approach in their article [8].…”