Purpose:

Academic engagement is required for good academic result and for building career of the students. Management students get ready to serve mostly corporate sectors and corporates look for engaged employees. Encouraging student’s engagement may help them to develop the habit of remaining engaged with their current and coming assignments. Individual personality Big Five Traits impacts engagement, here we are to analyze how each trait influence engagement of the students. Effect of support of the people at vicinity parent, teachers’ and positive TMX on the relationship between big five traits and academic engagement needs examination to understand how these factors relate in the whole process of generation of academic engagement of management students.

Design/Methodology:

The cross-sectional exercise attempts to find the impact of different Big Five Personality traits on academic engagement of the students and how does Parental, Teachers’ Support and Positive TMX influence on the relationship. Management students of different universities of Tripura chosen and data collected through selected Questionnaires. Data were subjected to Correlation, Regression and Mediation Analysis and the Mediation analysis was confirmed on a large sample using Bootstrapping Model.

Findings:

The paper finds all big five traits significantly relates to academic engagement, only neuroticism negatively relates. Trait Conscientiousness relates most intensely, followed by extraversion. Teachers’ Support mediate completely the relationship between different traits with academic engagement. Positive TMX mediates the relationship between only Extraversion and Agreeableness with academic engagement.

Originality:

This comprehensive study on the effects of Big Five personality traits on academic engagement and the impact of the parental, teacher’s support and positive TMX on it aimed at enhancing academic engagement of the management students is perhaps first of its kind. Findings that teacher’s support neutralizes the influence of negative motivation-oriented trait neuroticism on academic engagement is a striking and useful revelation of the study.