Individual differences what makes employees unique

The study points out interestingly the cross-cultural conceptualization of resiliency. In another study, Lau, Chiesi and Saklofske examined how two personality traits, cheerfulness and seriousness, may interact in relation to resiliency that in turn mediates the relationship between cheerfulness and subjective well-being. The results, using a sample of Italian students and their families, show that cheerfulness is positively related to subjective wellbeing. Moreover, resilience significantly mediated the relationship between these two variables, while the relationship between cheerfulness and resilience was moderated by seriousness: The relation was stronger at low levels of seriousness.

Gardner , in a sample of managers mostly from USA aimed to analyze the moderating role of resilience in the indirect relationships between both internal and external antecedents and wellbeing. The author found that autonomy as an external resource in interaction with resilience an internal resource influenced organizational-based self-esteem OBSE that in turn mediated the relations between autonomy and psychological wellbeing.

Against the hypothesized moderation of resilience, the results showed that high job autonomy most benefited in terms of OBSE those participants who were low in trait resilience, while providing fewer benefits to high resilient participants. Authenticity is another important personality variable that plays a role in promoting individual wellbeing. Sutton from a positive psychology perspective aimed to establish, through a meta-analysis, the relationships of authentic expression of self with well-being 65 studies and with engagement 10 studies.

Overall, the meta-analysis highlighted that authenticity shows positive significant relations both with individual well-being and work engagement. Moreover, the individualism-collectivism cultural dimension played a moderator role between authenticity and well-being: The more collectivist culture, the weaker the relationship. S imonette and Castille focused on the meaning at work, an important source of personal fulfillment.

Through the analysis of partial correlations of personality and job characteristic variables the authors found that the meaning of work can play a mediator role linking some of those variables to important organizational outcomes.

The results of the study showed that enthusiasm directly and other personality aspects indirectly through job characteristics were related to experienced meaningfulness at work. Nevertheless, job characteristics are more strongly associated with experienced meaningfulness than personality aspects, pointing out the potential of job redesign in enhancing meaningful experiences at work.

Self Determination Theory is a fruitful approach to analyze the influence of external and internal variables on employees' wellbeing. Malinowska and Tokarz analyzed the role of general causality orientations in the motivational impact of job resources on work engagement on outsourcing sector employees working in Poland. Both autonomous orientation boosting the relation and impersonal orientation causality buffering the relation moderated the relationship between job resources and work engagement while controlled orientation did not play such a moderation role.

The results show the importance of the interaction between situational and individual resources to predict engagement. In fact, work engagement is an important construct in the study of individuals' wellbeing in organizations.

Results confirmed the mediation role of work engagement between personality traits, and performance and mental health.

However, results also showed that core self-evaluation variables directly predicted performance and mental health and psychological capital directly predicted mental health. The authors explain the differences distinguishing the personality traits from the more malleable personality characteristics.

Core self-evaluation CSE have additionally attracted the interest of studies that analyze engagement. Bipp, Kleingeld and Ebert studied the role of core self-evaluations as a positive, personal resource in the motivational engagement and health impairment burnout exhaustion and disengagement processes. The authors found that CSE directly predicts engagement and also influences it through job crafting increasing structural resources.

Nevertheless, the interaction of CES with job crafting was non-significant. In a second study, the authors tested a similar model to predict health impairment and found that CES negatively predicted both burnout dimensions. Additionally, psychological detachment partially mediated the prediction of CES on exhaustion. Finally, the interaction of CES and detachment did not significantly predict burnout. The authors conclude that CES, as a broad individual difference set of variables play a relevant role in the motivational and the health impairment processes at work and recommend to take it into consideration when designing and implementing human resources practices.

The relationships of personality traits and individual differences with initiative and proactive behaviors have also received attention in several studies included in this special issue. Tu, Lu, Wang, and Liu , through a multisource longitudinal study, examined the lagged relations between conscientiousness and proactive behavior in a sample of professional and administration Chinese employees. The study found that, in line with the broaden-and-build theory, that the employees' flourishing at Time 2 T2 significantly mediated the lagged relation of conscientiousness T1 and proactive behavior T3.

In addition, job meaningfulness T1 significantly strengthened the relationship between conscientiousness and flourishing. In this way, this study contributed in clarifying the how and when the conscientiousness personality trait had a stronger impact on proactive behavior. Then, following the job demands-resources model, examined the roles of job crafting and strengths use to predict contextual performance in a sample of health care professionals in Romania.

The results showed that job crafting is predicted by conscientiousness and openness and that the use of one's own strengths partially mediated the influence of job crafting on contextual performance, that is considered an important performance output in health care services. Moreover, their analyses show lagged relationship between ISCS and indicators of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being at work.

In sum, the papers considered in this section have provided a rich view of how personality and individual differences contribute to the wellbeing, health and performance of employees in organizations and also how, under several internal or external boundary conditions and paths, they contribute to promote healthy, happy and productive members that may enhance healthier organizations.

The third section of studies focus on emotional intelligence, an important construct in recent studies aiming to contribute to enhance organizational health. Four contributions have been gathered in this special issue that focus on the study of emotional intelligence EI in relation to different related constructs such as personality occupational traits, wellbeing hedonic, eudaimonic and engagement and career adaptability. The article by Furnham and Taylor examines the relationship between emotional intelligence EI and occupational personality scales in senior management using the occupational scales of Hogan Personality Inventory HPI with a sample from South and West African countries.

The results show that EI measured as EQ-i 2. The authors underlined the implications for personnel selection. The model was tested in two independent Spanish teacher samples childhood and primary educators; secondary educators.

The results showed that emotional intelligence did not moderate the relationship between emotional demands and self-appraised stress. However, it did buffer the relationship between self-appraised stress and work engagement in both teacher samples. The findings offered guidance for intervention to reduce the detrimental effects of stress on work engagement. Di Fabio and Kenny presented two studies examining the relationships between individual psychological resources trait EI and Positive Relational Management and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

In particular, the first study showed that trait EI explained a percentage of incremental variance beyond the one accounted for by personality traits concerning both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. The second study highlighted the contribution of Positive Relational Management PRM beyond personality traits to hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

Finally, Parmentier, Pirsoul, and Nils presented a study that investigated the lagged relations of emotional intelligence on career adaptability in a two-wave longitudinal study among a sample of adult learners. Their results showed that emotional intelligence predicted career adaptability while controlling for prior levels of career adaptability and socio-demographic variables.

These findings underlined the role of emotional intelligence for adaptive career processes in Belgian adult learners.

Managers should therefore not set themselves the goal of changing the personality of employees, but personality can be used to understand behavior. A large amount of research shows that personality is a good predictive and explanatory factor for the thinking, feeling, and behavior of employees in the workplace. Personality, for example, influences work-related attitudes and behavior, such as career satisfaction and coping with work-related stress.

In addition to personality, however, the situation also affects attitudes and behavior. If the situational pressure is strong, personality has less influence on work-related behavior. Employees are not free in varying behavior in such situations and so personality is not decisive.

Both personality and situation factors can, therefore, influence behavior. Eventually, cognition, affect, and behavior are determined by the interaction between personality and situation. Effective managers understand this interaction and use it to help employees perform optimally. According to the attraction-selection-attrition ASA model of Schneider an organization attracts persons with corresponding personalities attraction and selects them selection while rejecting other types of personalities attrition.

As a result of the combination of attraction, selection, and attrition, a sort of 'typical' personality develops for a specific organization. ASA processes work in different ways. When hiring future employees, for example, people are unconsciously chosen to fit the current employees.

In this way, the nature of the organization ultimately becomes a reflection of the typical personality of the employee. The Big Five Personality Model consists of 5 personality traits extraversion, neuroticism, altruism, conscientiousness, and openness that in turn consist of specific sub-traits.

These personality traits are at the top of the trait hierarchy. People can be placed on a continuum for each trait. Extraversion is the tendency to experience positive affect and to feel good about the self and the world. Introversion - the other side of the continuum - is associated with less positive feelings and less social interaction. Extraversion is associated with more career satisfaction in the workplace.

Neuroticism means that there is a tendency to experience negative feelings about the self and the world. People with strong neurotic traits experience stress more quickly and are critical of themselves. This can be a vulnerability but also a force. Because of their critical attitude, they are driven to improve their performance and are able to reflect critically during group discussions.

So it is not just a negative trait. Altruism agreeableness refers to the property to be able to get along well with others. Low scorers on this personality trait are antagonistic and suspicious. In some cases, this property may be useful, for example in debt collecting where social skills are greatly needed.

Conscientiousness refers to care and perseverance. This is accompanied by orderliness and self-discipline. Conscientiousness is a good predictor for career success. It must be accompanied by the right skills for work and social competence.

Kate is finding it increasingly difficult to manage her workload. Having gone through a recent divorce, she is finding it difficult to cope with the demands from all sides of her life. She feels that there is a lack of support from her manager, and she has no one to turn to at home.

Kate is feeling overwhelmed by her work situation and sinking further into despair. She is very afraid that stress will negatively affect her health. Sara has also felt the negative consequences of her increasing workload, but she has more outside support.

She has been able to talk things through with her partner at home, and because of this asked for some workplace assistance to manage her stress. Sara feels that the stress will pass in due course. Having someone to mentor her through the rough spots and help her prioritize her work has helped her build resilience to manage the dynamics of the modern workplace. Both Sara and Kate face the same workplace stressors, yet have appraised their stressful situations in different ways. Many factors are at play here.

Sara has outside support. Having a good social network has shown to improve well-being, even in the face of stress. While Kate continues to sink under the mounting pressure, Sara has been able to view the situation in a more positive light. Neither woman got much support from her own manager, but Sara was able to realize that he was under too much pressure himself. She decided to raise this with other senior members of the team and sought mentoring from a workplace assistance program.

She feels that the lessons she has learned from this experience will be of assistance in helping her become a more resilient and adaptable employee in future. The unique blend of personality traits, past and current experience, and characteristics will all play a role in this perception and appraisal process.

When is the load too heavy? Subjective feelings of overload can give rise to harmful stress, especially if the stress surpasses what employees believe they can cope with or the stressor itself is perceived to be harmful. In contrast, placing more accepting meanings to a stressor can result in a more resilient outcome.

Organizations can aim not just to address the stressors themselves, but also help people deal with any potential negative emotional cycles associated with stressors.

Sara reached out for help. But could management have reached out to Kate, helping her reduce her workload, or even connect her with a mentoring program that could help her deal more effectively with the workload that caused her to have such a negative experience of stress in the workplace? Fredrickson, B. For each demographic, a breakout of drivers of engagement will be shown.

The above graph shows that professional growth and career development opportunities becomes a weaker driver of engagement as employees become more tenured. Conversely, believing leaders value people as their most important resource generally becomes a stronger driver of engagement as employees become more tenured. This suggests that less-tenured employees may feel more engaged when growth opportunities are clearly visible to them, whereas more-tenured employees may feel more engaged when they believe leadership values them.

Rather, these results indicate that individual differences determine what actions will engage employees. For another analysis of tenure, see research I conducted exploring the tenure curve.