Occupation-personality fit is associated with higher employee engagement and happiness

Paul McCarthy, Margaret L. Kern, Xian Gong, Michael Parker and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Using large scale data sets about Australians (n=99,897) active on social media in a variety of occupations (n=624) across all industries, we used a variety of linguistic analysis techniques to infer user’s happiness, engagement and Big5 personality traits across 30 dimensions, as well as their occupational-personality fit when compared to others in the same role. We found that: (a) when roles are clustered by the personality traits of those in them there appears to be eight groups or ‘tribes’ made up of roles with similar personality trait combinations; (b) happiness, as measured by inferred current happiness, is positively correlated with occupation-personality fit and; (c) engagement is significantly correlated with occupation-personality fit and can explain over 25% of the variance in engagement in a sample of 18k people across 624 roles. These findings show that occupation and personality fit play a material and significant role in employee engagement, which in turn is known to have many firm-level and economy-wide outcomes.

Keywords: Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity; Employee Engagement; Occupation-Fit; Personality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-lma
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/113346/1/MPRA_paper_113346.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/114458/1/MPRA_paper_113346.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/114458/8/MPRA_paper_114458.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:113346

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().