Engagement

Engagement refers to a positive, fulfilling work-related psychological state. Engagement allows individuals to express an authentic sense of self that is aligned with their job role. Much research on engagement has neglected to consider the phenomenological and contextualised experience of engagement. This has led to calls for studies that investigate engagement in a deeper way so that its antecedents can be better understood.

Luke Fletcher has examined the experience of engagement at work, with PhD funding for three years provided by the University of Kent. This PhD thesis aimed to develop a contextually richer understanding of engagement by focusing on general experiences of engagement as well as most and least engaging situations within the day. A mixed methods study involving quantitative work diaries and qualitative interviews was conducted with 124 employees across six organisations.

Project timeframe

This research project commenced in 2011 and ended in 2015.

Project objectives

The objectives of this research were to:

  • examine, in close detail, how employees experience engagement in everyday working life
  • explore how features of the organisational context, such as occupational and HRM factors, shape general levels of engagement
  • clarify the situational factors that are most associated with fluctuating levels of engagement within the day.

Project findings and impact

The main findings from this research were:

  • Two key features of the organisational context influenced general levels of engagement across all six organisations: occupational factors and HRM factors. The range and type of occupational groups within the organisation, the occupational role of the individual, and the range and form of HR practices utilised by the organisation were found to influence how generally engaged employees felt. The HR practices found to be most related to engagement were training and career development, performance management, and flexible work practices.
  • Significant organisational changes were occurring within the public sector, which subsequently affected the engagement of employees within these organisations. These changes had included increased job insecurity, psychological uncertainty, perceived violations of psychological contract, and emotional labour which consequently had threatened various aspects of employees' self concepts. Therefore, many employees found it difficult to fully engage during this period of time due to the negative psychological effects of the change process.
  • Perceptions of task characteristics (for example, variety and clarity), task fit (for example, alignment with needs and abilities) and personal resources (for example, self-efficacy) were most strongly associated with fluctuating levels of engagement within the working day. Supervisory and co-worker support were found to be less important to situational engagement than the other factors. It indicates that engagement within the working day is most influenced by the design and structure of the workday rather than the social context.
  • Meaningfulness and psychological availability, but not psychological safety, were core psychological processes that linked contextual factors (for example, organisational and situational) with the experience of engagement. This indicates that engagement is fostered through experiencing work as personally valuable and worthwhile, and maintained through the active regulation of resources.

Research team

Dr Luke Fletcher

Output

Fletcher, L. (forthcoming) Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day. To be presented at the 75th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, August 2015, Vancouver BC, Canada.

Fletcher, L. and Robinson, D. (2014) Measuring and understanding engagement. In C.Truss et al (Eds.) Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice (pp.587-627). London, Routledge.

Fletcher, L. and Truss, C. (2013)  LV= Achieving Business Turn-Around Through Employee Engagement. European Case Clearing House.

Fletcher, L., Truss, C. and Gilman, M. (2013) The experience of engagement within the working day: A mixed methods study. Presented at the 16th Congress of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology, Münster, Germany.

Luke Fletcher passed his PhD with no corrections in June 2014, and is currently writing up a number of papers from this research project for publication in highly ranked academic journals. He has presented his PhD research at the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology and will be presenting at the Academy of Management conference.

Partners

This project was funded by the University of Kent as part of a PhD scholarship under the supervision of Professor Katie Bailey (née Truss) and Dr Mark Gilman.