Assessing the Relationship between Engagement in Faculty Administrative Functions and Personality (OCEAN) Traits of Adjunct Faculty

As university administrators increase the staffing and usage of adjunct faculty across their four-year degree granting institutions, they must continue to explore opportunities to improve the increased role of this faculty population in administrative functions. This comes at a time as university administrators are called to increase faculty engagement in various faculty administrative roles. A university administrator's ability to predict work engagement of their adjunct faculty candidates will serve as a valuable resource as they redefine the faculty governance structure within their universities. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between differences in personality traits and work engagement levels of adjunct faculty within a four-year institution to provide university administrators information to make staffing decisions and achieve fulfillment of adjunct faculty participation in faculty administrative roles. The participants in the proposed study involved adjunct faculty at a large, four-year university that employees over 6,000 adjunct faculty members. Two hundred and sixty four participants responded to a survey that included the Big Five Inventory to evaluate personality traits and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) yielding a 26% response rate. A part and partial correlation statistics and multiple linear regression analysis were conducted to test the research question hypotheses. The results of the study indicated that a positive correlation between work engagement and extroversion (r(264) = .001, p < 0.05), conscientiousness (r(264) = .019, p < 0.05), and openness to experience (r(264) = .000, p < 0.05) existed across the sample population. However, only the extroversion (r = 0.306) and openness to experience (r = 0.362) personality traits indicated a low to moderate strength of relationship with work engagement. The multiple linear regression analysis concluded that work engagement was primarily predicted by higher levels of conscientiousness (b = .820) and openness to experience (b = .705) and lower levels of neuroticism (b = -.158), and to a lesser extent by higher levels of extroversion (b = .207). Future research is recommended to qualitatively explore the reasons for the correlation of each personality trait to work engagement and to expand the sample size across multiple universities.