Modificacion de conducta

1 Running head: PERSONAL SIDE OF ENGAGEMENT

The Personal Side of Engagement Cristina Wildermuth, Ed.D. Wright State University

2 THE PERSONAL SIDE OF ENGAGEMENT Introduction If we are truly interested in a personal connection to work, shouldn’t we measure the person instead? Ed Gubman, 2004 We must bring the person to the engagement debate. This was the gist of the argument made bybusiness consultant Ed Gubman (2004) in From Engagement to Passion for Work: The Search for the Missing Person. Gubman argued that current discussions on engagement involve two components: where the person works and what the person does. As an alternative, organizations should start focusing on who the person is. Truly, William Kahn’s (1990) landmark study on engagement did not focus on the person.Instead, Kahn sought to understand powerful psychological conditions that could “survive the gamut of individual differences” (p. 695). Kahn identified three such conditions: meaningfulness (the perceived “worth” of engaging at work), safety (how safe it is to be oneself at work), and availability of resources, both emotional and physical, to perform one’s duties. Engagement researchers, however, haveacknowledged the potential impact of the person on engagement. First, Kahn (1990) argued that individual differences might influence the kinds of roles employees find engaging or disengaging as well as personal experiences of meaningfulness, safety, and availability of resources. Secondly, Schaufeli and Bakker (2003) described engagement as a relatively “persistent and pervasiveaffective-cognitive state” (p. 4). Such longer-term description of engagement seems to suggest at least some level of connection between engagement and the makeup of the individual. This chapter addresses the personal side of engagement. Specifically, the relationship between engagement and the five-factor model of personality (FFM) is explored. The chapter

3 includes a) an introduction to the FFM; b) a reviewof Macey and Schneider’s (2008) tridimensional model of engagement including trait, state, and behavioral components; c) a summary of recent research studies on personality and engagement and d) a discussion of existing findings, including practical implications, an integrated model of engagement, and topics for future research. The five factor model of personality During the last decade, the fivefactor model (FFM) of personality has gained considerable support among researchers. The origins of the model are generally linked to the pioneer work of Gordon Allport on personality and linguistics. Allport was a Harvard professor and a personality pioneer who taught the first college level personality course in the United States (Owen, 1998). Arguing that natural languages were an excellentsource of personality information, Allport issued a challenge to the psychological community: the search for the smallest number of “clusters” combining 18,000 trait-related words found in the Webster’s Second International Dictionary (Saucier & Goldberg, 2003). While the exact names attributed to each FFM trait may vary, most sources consulted (Howard & Howard, 2001a; Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002;McCrae & Costa, 1997; Mount, Barrick, & Stewart, 1998) agreed on the following five traits: neuroticism (also referred to as need for stability and emotional stability), extraversion, openness to experiences (also called originality and intellect), agreeableness (also called accommodation) and conscientiousness (also called consolidation). Neuroticism has to do with the individual’s generaltolerance for stress. Individuals who are high in neuroticism are more reactive than average and often report less satisfaction with life.

4 Conversely, those who are low in neuroticism tend to present more composed, resilient, and adaptable behaviors (Howard & Howard, 1995). Extraversion represents a person’s general sociability and tolerance for sensory stimulation (Howard & Howard, 2001a)....