Perfectionism and Employee Engagement among Management Faculty: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Purpose: Today's Business environment is posing numerous challenges for the organizations due to which survival is becoming tough day by day. However, to handle any challenge the most invigorating resource, any organization can bank upon is their employees. Engaged employees are found to deliver high performance & thus in order to understand the key antecedents of employee engagement, the purpose of this study was to examine how perfectionism and the three forms of perfectionism i.e. self-oriented perfectionism, other oriented perfectionism, and socially prescribed perfectionism were associated with employee engagement in a sample of faculty members in management institutions. It also focused on examining and understanding the interaction between employee engagement and the task performance.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper used predominantly the quantitative approach and briefly outlines the relationship between perfectionism, the three forms of perfectionism and employee engagement using the data from a sample of 218 faculty members from 12 private institutions and 3 private universities of Northern Indian region. Data was collected using a battery of questionnaires including the Hewitt & Flett (1991)'s Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS), the Intellectual, Social, Affective Engagement Scale (ISA Engagement Scale), and the Goodman and Syvantek (1999)'s task performance scale. Pilot testing was done to check the reliability of the questionnaire and the Cronbach alpha value was found to be 0.76. Correlations, regressions and descriptive analysis were carried out.

Findings: The study results provided considerable support for the hypothesized relationships and indicate that perfectionism predicts employee engagement among management faculty. The results also indicated that employee engagement bears a positive relationship with task performance. The study results suggested that the management institutions should realign their HR processes to develop a sense of perfectionism in their employees' personality in order to affect the employee engagement and task performance of their employees in a positive way.

Originality/value: The paper contributes by filling a gap in the management literature, in which empirical studies on perfectionism and its relationship with employee engagement among the faculty members in management institutions have been scarce until now. This study also contributes to the academic research by highlighting a positive interaction between employee engagement and task performance and negating the speculation that employee engagement is just the latest management fad.