Polytechnic Commerce Students Personality Factors In Relations To Their Preparedness Towards Workplace

Malaysian Polytechnic students joining the workforce are expected to be highly educated, have good personality and well prepared. Employees’ personality have great impact on their behavior and performance at the workplace. Therefore knowledge of individual personality can lead to a more effective human resource management. Over the years, due to Malaysian economic growth, the workplace has undergone significant changes in the sense that workers need to prepare themselves with technical skills and good personality in order to be successful. The purpose of the study was to investigate if there was any positive significant relationship between commerce students personality factors with their preparedness towards workplace. It was hypothesized that students with high self-esteem self-monitoring and locus of control would have performed better in terms of industrial training performance, academic achievement and perceived ability to
understand and perform at workplace. The methodological approach was systematic random sampling using a structured, 68 items questionnaire which was distributed to 252 marketing, accounting and business students at the six polytechnics in Malaysia. 199 questionnaires were returned and analyzed. The independent variables (self-esteem, self-monitoring, locus of control) and the dependent variables (ability, academic performance and industrial training performance) were analyzed using Pearson correlations coefficient and Stepwise regression methods in the SPSS. It was found that there was a positive significant relationship between self-monitoring and students perceived ability to understand and perform at the workplace. However there was no significant relationship between students self-esteem and locus of control with their preparedness towards workplace. Commerce students need self-monitoring in their sales and marketing tasks in order to be successful in the heterogeneous market environment in Malaysia. Personality factors like self-esteem, self-monitoring and locus control can be developed in students by proper training. It was recommended that further research on this subject be conducted with larger sample size and by taking into consideration of other factors such as teaching methods, length of training and the relevancy of course contents.