Catherine Bailey

The Meaning, Antecedents and Outcomes of Employee Engagement: A Narrative Synthesis

The claim that high levels of engagement can enhance organizational performance and individual well-being has not previously been tested through a systematic review of the evidence. To bring coherence to the diffuse body of literature on engagement, the authors conducted a systematic synthesis of narrative evidence involving 214 studies focused on the meaning, antecedents and outcomes of engagement. The authors identified six distinct conceptualizations of engagement, with the field dominated by the Utrecht Groups ‘work engagement’ construct and measure, and by the theorization of engagement within the ‘job demands–resources’ framework. Five groups of factors served as antecedents to engagement: psychological states; job design; leadership; organizational and team factors; and organizational interventions. Engagement was found to be positively associated with individual morale, task performance, extra-role performance and organizational performance, and the evidence was most robust in relation to task performance. However, there was an over-reliance on quantitative, cross-sectional and self-report studies within the field, which limited claims of causality. To address controversies over the commonly used measures and concepts in the field and gaps in the evidence-base, the authors set out an agenda for future research that integrates emerging critical sociological perspectives on engagement with the psychological perspectives that currently dominate the field.

Time reclaimed: temporality and the experience of meaningful work:

The importance of meaningful work has been identified in scholarly writings across a range of disciplines. However, empirical studies remain sparse and the potential relevance of the concept of temporality, hitherto somewhat neglected even in wider sociological studies of organizations, has not been considered in terms of the light that it can shed on the experience of work as meaningful. These two disparate bodies of thought are brought together to generate new accounts of work meaningfulness through the lens of temporality. Findings from a qualitative study of workers in three occupations with ostensibly distinct temporal landscapes are reported. All jobs had the potential to be both meaningful and meaningless; meaningfulness arose episodically through work experiences that were shared, autonomous and temporally complex. Schutz’s notion of the ‘vivid present’ emerged as relevant to understanding how work is rendered meaningful within an individual’s personal and social system of relevances.

The effect of HRM attributions on emotional exhaustion and the mediating roles of job involvement and work overload

Although some research suggests that perceptions of HRM practices are associated with lower levels of employee wellbeing, other research shows just the opposite. In the present study, we attempt to reconcile these discrepant findings by incorporating the role of HRM attributions. Our model posits that when employees perceive that their organisation’s HRM practices are intended to improve their job performance, they experience higher levels of job involvement, which leads to lower levels of emotional exhaustion. Conversely, when employees believe that their organisation’s HRM practices are intended to reduce organisational costs, they experience work overload, which translates into higher levels of emotional exhaustion. Parallel mediation analyses of survey data collected from employees of a construction and consultancy organisation at two time periods (n=180) supported this theoretical model.

Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: a multilevel study

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety serve as mechanisms through which the work context during discrete situations within the workday influences ‘state’ engagement. We further theorised that a person’s ‘trait’ level of engagement would exert cross-level effects on the ‘state’ level relationships. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations and 1,446 situational observations revealed that meaningfulness and availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between perceptions of the work context and ‘state’ engagement. High levels of ‘trait’ engagement strengthened the within-person relation between availability and ‘state’ engagement, yet weakened the within-person relation between meaningfulness and ‘state’ engagement; suggesting two different processes may be at play. Overall, the findings advance our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally dynamic psychological phenomenon, and promote a contextually-based HRM approach to facilitating engagement.

‘For this I was made’: conflict and calling in the role of a woman priest

There has been an increasing focus on ‘work as calling’ in recent years, but relatively few empirical sociological accounts that shed light on the experience of performing calling work. Although callings have generally been referred to as positive and fulfilling to the individual and as beneficial to society, researchers have also suggested there is a ‘dark side’ to calling, and have drawn attention to the potential conflicts and tensions inherent in the pursuit of calling, especially for women. This article explores these themes through the first-hand experiences of one woman who felt called to work as a priest. Her narrative illustrates how callings draw the individual irresistibly towards a particular line of work. It also shows how calling work can be both satisfying individually and beneficial to the wider community but, at the same time, involves sacrifice, compromise and a willingness to defer personal rewards.

Deadly combinations: how leadership contexts undermine the activation and enactment of followers’ high core self-evaluations in performance

ABSTRACT Employees with high core self-evaluations (CSE) generally perform well in their jobs. The enactment of CSE in performance occurs within contexts, and leadership is one form of context that influences the activation and expression of CSE. Drawing on theories of CSE and leader–member exchange (LMX), we characterized the leadership context as the interaction between leader CSE and LMX quality. Examination of 173 followers and their 31 leaders in a manufacturing organization showed a positive association between follower CSE and performance when the context comprised high leader CSE and high LMX. Conversely, leadership contexts comprising high leader CSE and low LMX, or low leader CSE and high LMX, resulted in a negative relationship between follower CSE and performance. We also show that low CSE followers have relatively high performance under some circumstances. Thus, we contribute to understanding how some leadership contexts undermine high CSE followers’ performance and promote low CSE followers’ performance.