SummaryIn order to identify the employees who are most likely to be engaged in their work, we conducted a meta‐analysis of 114 independent samples (N = 44,224) to provide estimates of the relationship between eight personality traits and employee engagement. Results indicated that these personality traits explained 48.10% of the variance in engagement. Supporting energy management theories, relative weights analysis revealed that positive affectivity was by far the strongest predictor of engagement (31.10% of the explained variance; ρ = .62), followed by proactive personality (19.60%; ρ = .49), conscientiousness (14.10%; ρ = .39), and extraversion (12.10%; ρ = .40), whereas neuroticism, negative affectivity, agreeableness, and openness to experience were the least important. We highlight the importance of positive affectivity for engagement and support personality‐based selection as a viable means for organizations to build a highly engaged workforce. Implications for using personality assessment to select engaged employees are discussed.

Although transactional leadership is known to be the most common style of leadership in organizations, meta-analytic work has yet to fully uncover the relationship between transactional leadership and one of the most focal leadership outcomes: follower performance. Moreover, little is known about the mechanisms that explain why transactional leadership predicts follower performance. To address these gaps, the current article meta-analytically tests a model based on social exchange theory and self-determination theory in which transactional leadership is theorized to affect follower performance sequentially through leader–member exchange (LMX) and psychological empowerment. Specifically, we argue that although some leadership behaviors (e.g., contingent reward) may benefit performance via positive contributions to the leader–follower social exchange, some leadership behaviors (e.g., contingent reward) may simultaneously exhibit negative effects on performance via reduced empowerment. Our results demonstrate that transactional leadership displays both positive and negative indirect effects on follower performance. Furthermore, the pattern of these effects generalizes to two types of performance: task performance and contextual performance. These findings suggest that transactional leadership is a “double-edged sword” when predicting follower performance (e.g., contingent reward fosters LMX but hinders empowerment, whereas management by exception fosters empowerment but hinders LMX). We discuss how leaders can benefit from these findings, including modifying one’s delivery of transactional leadership approaches.

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Despite the common belief that "training is only as effective as the trainer providing it" (Osborn, 2018, para. 1), training theory tends to underemphasize the trainer and instead focuses on training content and design as sources of training effectiveness. In this article, we examine whether the role of the trainer should be more central to training theory. We address this issue using a dataset of trainee reactions from more than 10,000 employees enrolled in professional development courses. We suggest that trainee reactions are more likely to be influenced by the trainer than by the content. Thus, trainee reactions should reflect more between-trainer variance than between-content variance. Across 2 studies in online and face-to-face contexts, cross-classified random-effects models provide general support for our hypotheses, with 1 notable exception: the trainer matters less for trainee reactions in online courses. Our findings suggest the trainer matters more than previously thought and, thus, training theory should incorporate the role of the trainer in training effectiveness. Based on our findings, we suggest that training researchers should (a) model the trainer as a source of variation in training evaluation metrics, (b) examine the effect of the trainer at multiple levels of analysis, and (c) explicitly model the role of the trainer in training theory and design.

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