Employee engagement of private sector employees in Southern Thailand: personality, transformational leadership and psychological safety

The motivation for this study is driven by the inconsistent findings in the literature concerning the relationship between the variables related to employee engagement. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of a five-factor model of personality consists of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to
experience, and neuroticism factors on employee engagement. Further, it examines the mediation role of psychological safety on the relationship between
transformational leadership and employee engagement. Accordingly, this study is underpinned by self-determination theory to explain the network of the relationship between the variables in the conceptual framework. The study utilized a survey questionnaire which was distributed to 608 employees of private companies in Southern Thailand. Out of the 422 returned questionnaires, 402 were usable for further analysis. PLS-SEM was used to analyze the direct and indirect relationship between the related variables in the study. Of the five personality factors, three which are extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience factors influence the employee engagement. However agreeableness and neuroticism factors do not influence employee engagement. Transformational leadership is discovered to have both direct and indirect influence on the employee
engagement. The psychological safety also shows to have an influence on the employee engagement. In addition, the psychological safety constructs is discovered to be a partial mediator in the relationship between the transformational leadership and the employee engagement. The results of the predictive power of the structural model is 0.337 indicating that 33.7% of the variance in the employee engagement construct is explained by the five-factor model of personality, transformational
leadership and psychological safety. Theoretical, practical and methodological implications of the study are highlighted. Finally, limitations and further research are also discussed in this paper