Know Your Followers: Who are the Most Engaged at Work and What Leaders Can do About it

In this day and age, the notion that leaders should seek to develop engaged workplaces is nearly a cliché.

But how are we doing on this front?  It turns out that it is not going so well: According to Gallup, only 33 percent of U.S. employees on average have been actively engaged since the turn of the millennium [1].

This statistic should startle you, considering how much a disengaged workforce can cost. One report suggests that the costs in lost productivity for U.S. businesses can be up to $550 billion each year [2].  Not to mention the large body of research demonstrating that improved job attitudes and employee engagement have a number of benefits that organizations simply cannot ignore (e.g., bolstered financial returns, improved performance and productivity, etc.).

So what can leaders do to improve their followers’ engagement?

Well, one option might be to invest in the training and development of both leaders and followers. Programs and interventions are often implemented in an effort to bolster employee engagement (and consulting firms are frequently hired to deliver these programs). Surprisingly, the impact of these programs is not very strong. In a recent review of nearly 1,800 employees, the impact of leadership training (along with other interventions) on engagement was quite small [3].

Another, less common approach might be for leaders to attract and recruit people who are predisposed to becoming engaged. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, my co-authors (Henry Young, Michigan State University; Wei Wang, Northwestern University; Dana Joseph, University of Central Florida) and I tackled the question of “who are the most engaged at work?” to help optimize attraction and recruitment efforts for engagement [4].

We must say that this appears to be a popular question in and of itself—a Google search we conducted in March 2018 for “hiring engaged employees” produced over 85 million results!

We reviewed research on nearly 45,000 employees and whether their personality traits were related to their levels of engagement. We looked at three different clusters of personality traits:

• Proactive Personality: The tendency for people to purposefully alter their circumstances to bring about constructive change.
• Affectivity: The tendency for people to experience positive emotions, such as excitement, interest, and enthusiasm (i.e., positive affectivity), as well as negative emotions, such as distress, irritability, and nervousness (i.e., negative affectivity)
• The “Big Five” Framework: Consists of five cardinal personality tendencies or traits: (a) Conscientiousness (e.g., achievement-seeking, self-disciplined), (b) Emotional Stability (e.g., impulsive, self-conscious), (c) Extraversion (e.g., outgoing, energetic), (d) Agreeableness (e.g., compliant, tender-minded), and (e) Openness to Experience (e.g., curious, ingenious).

We believe that certain personality traits can make employees more or less prone to become engaged.  Personality traits can affect how well employees are able to manage their energy levels—some traits can help individuals direct and regulate their energy toward their work, whereas others can serve as a resource drain, leading to a depletion of energy.

We found that personality was very strongly linked to employee engagement. Overall, the overwhelmingly strongest predictor of employee engagement was positive affectivity. Notably, proactive personality, conscientiousness and extraversion were also strong predictors of employee engagement.

Our results suggest a number of implications for leaders:

1. Although we cannot recommend hiring people based on their positive affectivity (for a number of reasons), leaders tasked with hiring responsibilities should consider applicants’ proactivity, conscientiousness, and extraversion in hiring decisions, given their relationship with engagement and other important work outcomes.
2. Leaders should shy away from taking a one-size-fits-all approach with their followers. Given that employees are predisposed to become engaged due to their personalities, leaders should adapt their approach to align with followers’ personalities. For example, an employee who tends to be more introverted may require a different approach than an extroverted employee.
3. Leadership training and development (for the purpose of improving employee engagement) should include adaptive leadership strategies that might focus on (a) understanding the employee and his/her situation, (b) selecting an engagement strategy for that employee and (c) following through and determining whether the strategy was effective.

Overall, it is clear that leaders who are interested in improving their followers’ engagement should consider the personality traits that make each of their employees unique—and seek to attract and recruit employees who are more likely to actively become engaged with their work.  

References:

[1] Adkins, A. (2016). Employee engagement in U.S. stagnant in 2015. https://news.gallup.com/poll/188144/employee-engagement-stagnant-2015.aspx

[2] Ray, R. L., Aparicio, R., Hyland, P., Dye, D. A., Simco, J., & Caputo, A. (2017). DNA of engagement: How organizations can foster employee ownership of engagement. https://www.conference-board.org/dna-engagement2017/

[3] Knight, C., Patterson, M., & Dawson, J. (2017). Building work engagement: A systematic review and meta-analysis investigating the effectiveness of work engagement interventions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(6), 792–812. 

[4] Young, H. R., Glerum, D. R., Wang, W., & Joseph, D. L. (forthcoming). Who are the most engaged at work? A meta-analysis of personality and employee engagement. Journal of Organizational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2303