Personality and psychological conditions in relation to job engagement amongst municipal workers in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has led many organisations to continuously search for ways to tap into the ever-changing world of work. The desire to maximise human capital is not a new concept; the methods used are changing to reflect the important role job engagement plays in the workplace. Job engagement has been considered as the most popular topic to be incorporated within the human resource management agenda if organisations are to outmanoeuver their competitors. According to Chen and Nadkarni (2017), because of intensive global competition there is need for organisations to better utilise human resources to achieve success. Nienaber and Martins (2016) conceived competitive advantage as the hallmark of rigorous strategy. Therefore, for organisations to successfully increase their competitive advantage, they need to develop strategies to attract, motivate and retain a highly skilled, flexible and adaptive workforce. These strategies are within the human resource management practises and can be addressed with factors such as job engagement, psychological conditions and personality traits. Despite the popularity of the concepts within the organisational setting, research findings on the potential of these constructs to attract, motivate and retain talent are not consistent. Mixed results have been reported on the impact of personality and psychological conditions on job engagement (Gulamali, 2017; Ongore, 2014). Conducting more research on the concepts using different populations and organisation will provide an indication on the empirical estimation of the constructs to achieve Orientation: Increasing job engagement in a sustainable way remains a challenge and the question remains as to why employees, when working under comparable conditions display signs of job engagement whereas others display a few or no signs of job engagement.