ENGAGED VERSUS DISENGAGED: THE ROLE OF OCCUPATIONAL SELF-EFFICACY

The fundamental aim of the present study of 126 business executives was to examine whether an engaged workforce could be differentiated from its disengaged counterpart based on occupational self-efficacy, which is an individual difference variable. We anticipated that work engagement would be characterised by high occupational self-efficacy and therefore predicted that it would positively correlate with occupational self-efficacy. Fisher s linear discriminant analysis was used to distinguish engaged employees from disengaged ones. The results showed that the command and adaptability dimensions of self-efficacy are found to be the most important in distinguishing engaged employees from their non-engaged counterparts. A logistic regression analysis was also carried out to determine whether socio-demographic variables contributed to group differences. The results of the logistic regression supported the findings of the discriminant analysis.