The adoption of high performance work practices and its effect on employee engagement: does individual personality matter?

Debates about the utility of personality as a predictor of individual outcomes, such as engagement, have been mainly assessed without taking into account the variability of impact in various situations. A growing eminent factor - high performance work practices (HPWP) - seems likely to influence the relationship between employee engagement and personality. In order to advance our present knowledge, I propose to test a person-situation, interactionist model of employee engagement that is informed by trait activation theory. I propose that personality will predict employee engagement variably, depending on the presence and intensity of organisational cues. Organisational cues (i.e. HPWP) are propositioned to moderate the relationship between personality and engagement. In testing this model, this study seeks to make two important contributions to the literature. First, it investigates the impact of HPWP on employee engagement. Second, it explores how organisational cues stimulate the influence of personality on engagement. The expectation of this study is that, through a better understanding of such relationships and the potential effectiveness of HPWP adoption, the selection and development of individual employees may be more effectively conducted.