Personality traits, motivation and knowledge worker productivity

Abstract

In an economic environment where knowledge based-work is the strategic component of value creation and competitive advantage, knowledge workers have become the engine that drives sustainability and profitability. Knowledge workers are described as workers with high degrees of education, expertise and whose primary task is to create, distribute and apply knowledge. With the increasing demand and number of knowledge workers in the work force, the productivity of knowledge workers has become an imperative management task as well as a decisive economic factor. Despite the continuous stream of research on knowledge worker productivity, knowledge worker productivity continues to be one of the greatest challenges facing managers today. Knowledge worker productivity refers to ability of knowledge workers to effectively collect, create and use inherent knowledge to produce goods and services. Inherent knowledge is highly personal and cannot be separated from the person who holds it. Further, inherent knowledge is closely related to the technical skills that an individual has and are only known to the person who possesses those skills. If organisations wish to leverage this inherent knowledge to their competitive advantage, they need to know how to engage and stimulate the deepest parts of the human mind. However, no two individuals are the same. Personnel psychology literature has long stressed that meaningful differences exist between people. These individual differences influence individual work performance and behaviour. Although several studies have addressed the issue of personality predicting job performance, there is a lack of knowledge of the relationship between personality, motivation and knowledge worker productivity, specifically in the South African context. This study attempts to address this lack of knowledge through a quantitative study of the relationship between personality, motivation and knowledge worker productivity. The study investigated whether the intrinsic personalities of knowledge workers and motivation predict knowledge worker productivity. Although several studies have directly addressed the issue of personality predicting job performance, few studies have directly investigated whether motivation mediates the relationship between personality and specifically knowledge worker productivity. Consequently, there is limited evidence to support the arguments of the present study. The theoretical and practical implications for knowledge worker productivity are discussed.