The Role Of Personality And Organizational Resources On External Engament

Abstract

The possibility for organizational mechanisms to affect individuals’ engagement in non-routinary, uncodified proactive behaviors is essential critical to improve organizational performance in knowledge intensive industries. Yet, how personality traits and organizational mechanisms sustain such behaviors is still largely a theoretical and empirical puzzle. Building on self-monitoring literature, our paper analyses the patterns of external engagements and the organizational mechanisms that support proactive behaviors, together with personality traits. Based on the analysis of a unique and comprehensive dataset investigating the external engagement patterns of academics, we are able to account for the organizational relevance of the self-monitoring trait in a real organizational setting, and to shed light on two underlying mechanisms that activate engagement in non-routinary and non-codified behaviors.