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.

These findings suggest that while physicians who promote and emphasize excitement states may be effective with European Americans, they may be less so with Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities who value different affective states. (PsycINFO Database Record

Positive emotions stemming from leisure activities are often promoted as a way to achieve a state of recovery, in particular by counteracting negative emotions experienced throughout the workday. Yet the recovery literature frequently takes an undifferentiated view of both the positive emotions employees experience as well as the negative emotions employees are recovering from; This implicitly assumes that all positive emotions are equally effective in facilitating recovery from all negative emotions. Drawing from theory treating emotional movements as a metaphorical journey, we develop a framework for understanding recovery that highlights the importance of the distance and direction that individuals "travel" when moving from negative emotions to positive emotions during the recovery process. We argue that the negative emotions that people start with from work-that is, their emotional origin-as well as the positive emotions that people end with following leisure activities-that is, their emotional destination-jointly influence the state of being recovered. Across two studies using experience-sampling methodologies, we find that "shorter" journeys consisting of emotional destinations that match the activation level of emotional origins (e.g., experiencing high activation positive emotion [HAP] to counter high activation negative emotion) are effective in promoting recovery, while "longer" journeys consisting of mismatches (e.g., experiencing HAP to counter low activation negative emotion) are ineffective for recovery.

No abstract