How Could an Understanding of Diverse Personalities Improve Employee Engagement?

Organizations are today working actively with diversity management in alignment with the regulations from Riksdagen to reduce discrimination against employees based on their "Gender, transgender identity or expression, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and age". Previously most focus has been put on the surface-level attributes of diversity such as age, gender and ethnicity but more emphasis and concern should be put on the deeper-level diversities such as personality. Scholars have stressed the importance of conducting qualitative studies that examine the deeper-level diversities in relation to diversity management. Moreover, there is an explicit need for investigating the effect that such a linkage between personality and diversity management can have on employee engagement levels. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether diversity management can be developed by looking at people’s personalities. This is achieved by answering the research question: How could an understanding of diverse personalities improve employee engagement? By examining this question, this study will give insight to whether personality is an aspect companies should consider in their diversity management when trying to understand and enhance employee engagement. By analyzing seven individuals at two international companies, located in Sweden, we were able to investigate a single case deeply and collect their subjective realities. Further, the study has taken a qualitative research approach in which seven semi-structured interviews were held and the empirical data was later derived through the use of a thematic analysis. It has been found with the application of the Five Factor Model (FFM) that the employees' personalities have a connection to their engagement levels. The analysis implied that the employees' personalities rather than surface-level diversities had an impact on their engagement. This makes it in turn reasonable to suggest that companies' diversity management practices can be further developed if looking at their employees' personalities. Ultimately this thesis has derived salient conclusions about the fact that FFM could be used to develop the understanding of diversity and diversity management. In turn this contributes with insight on how workplaces and the well-being of employees can be enhanced