This research study starts with the hypothesis that the personality traits of managers influence their leadership styles. Personality traits are taken from the model Big Five (McCrae and Costa) since it is one of the most dominant models of personality in modern psychology. Management styles (leadership) were investigated within the theories of transformational and transactional leadership, including laissez-faire style (Bruce Avolio & Bernard Bass). The research was conducted with 160 lower-level, middle-level and high-level managers in Serbia, employed in private and public sectors. From the questionnaire the NEO Personality Inventory (Serbian version, Kostić, P. 2002), and with the analysis of the main components, five dimensions of personality have been extracted: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience. From the shorter version of Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, three factors of leadership have been extracted: transformational, transactional and laissez-faire. The relationship between the received factors was checked by Pearson`s correlation coefficient and by multiple regression analysis. The received information showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between personality traits and leadership styles, and the most dominant relationship is between the transformational leadership style and extraversion (in a positive sense) and neuroticism (in a negative sense).

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The failure of managers and supervisors to earn the trust and followership of the employees with whom they work is well documented in recent research about employee engagement (Clifton & Harter, 2019). Without that employee commitment, organizations inevitably struggle to compete in the global marketplace and fail to achieve their potential (Cameron, 2012). Although much has been discussed in the light of the findings of concerned scholars (HR Research Institute, 2019), disagreement nonetheless exists about the factors which make up employee engagement, as well as the most effective approach that can be taken to increase engagement and those factors. Though there has not been full agreement about the nature of employee engagement, it is widely accepted that the failure of organizations to engage employees has been a serious deterrent to achieving organization results (Clifton & Harter, 2019).Objective: The purposes of this paper are to offer insights into the precise nature of employee engagement and to identify the value of employers adopting the Ethic of Friendship – an ethical perspective that has begun to be written about more frequently in the management literature.Methods: We begin the paper by proposing an integrated and updated definition of employee engagement – identifying nine factors which contribute to its makeup.Results: We suggest that each of these nine factors significantly impact employee engagement and warrant increased attention by organizational leaders. We then address the Ethic of Friendship and its increasingly important role in today’s arms-length and transactional relationship between employers and employees.Conclusions: The paper then clarifies how the Ethic of Friendship addresses all nine of the factors which constitute employee engagement and explains how the Ethic of Friendship can increase the ability of organization leaders, managers, and supervisors to bridge the gap of distrust that often exists in the modern organization. After identifying five important contributions made by this paper, we conclude by encouraging leaders to adopt the Ethic of Friendship’s commitment to treating employees as valued partners and, by so doing, create a culture in which employee engagement is likely to thrive.

This study explores the conflict management styles of German and Serbian managers in multinational organisations in Serbia. Contrary to most previous cross-cultural studies on conflict management styles, we have analysed not only the impact of the dimensions of individualism vs. collectivism on conflict management styles, but the effect of power distance dimension also. Moreover, none of the previous studies have analysed the conflict of management styles of managers in Southeast Europe, let alone the influence of intercultural interactions in multinational organisations in that region. Our study is based on the survey of 205 German, and 214 Serbian, managers in German multinationals in Serbia. The findings reveal that German and Serbian managers use different conflict management styles and that the status of the conflict partners and gender affect managers’ conflict management styles.