Antecedents of Work Engagement

Saks (2006) was one of the first academics to review the antecedents of work engagement. In his work, he talks about employee engagement, yet defines it in similar terms as work engagement in this study. According to Saks (2006), there is little research on the preconditions of employee engagement, yet finds potential antecedents from Kahn’s (1990) and Maslach et al’s (2001) models. The potential antecedents of employee engagement, that are illustrated in table 3, are:

Job characteristics, Perceived organizational support, Perceived supervisor support, Rewards and recognition, Procedural justice and Distributive justice. (Saks 2006).

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According to Saks (2006), job characteristics are the factors enhancing psychological meaningfulness, such as variety and the utilization of different skills, opportunity for important contribution, challenging tasks, feedback and autonomy. Perceived support from organization and supervisor relate to the sense of psychological safety, where a person feels at ease when employing one’s personal self at work. This can be affected by the amount of care and support employees receive from their organization and direct supervisors. Psychological safety can also evolve through trusting and supportive relationship between colleagues, as well as with management. All in all, if the working environment supports openness and supportiveness, where employees can experiment novel things and failure is not seen as a sin, psychological safety emerges. Perceived organizational support refers to the feeling of genuinely being taken care of and valued by the organization. Additionally, the lack of perceived supervisor support has been studied to enhance burnout and disengagement, thus it too is a central precondition for work engagement. Rewards and recognitions is the dimension in which people vary the most according to their perceptions of the benefits they receive from performing at their work. The feeling of giving something back can either be affected by the external or the internal rewards and recognitions.

Finally, Distributive and procedural justice refer to the predictability of the organization’s fair decision outcomes and to the fairness of the processes and means used to determine the amount and distribution of resources. This too has a psychological effect on employees; when having a sense of high justice in one’s organization, an employee is more likely to act fairly towards each other and the organization. Finally, Saks concludes, that the psychological conditions leading to work and organizational engagement are not the same, thus there exists a meaningful distinction between the two. His study revealed, that the thing that mostly supported work engagement, was job characteristics followed by perceived organizational support. (Saks 2006).

Table 3. Antecedents of work engagement according to Saks (2006)

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Sarti (2014) examined the antecedents of work engagement in her work, and found that job resources are the most influencing factors in work engagement. She discovered that four elements of job resources had the biggest impact and those were learning opportunity, coworker support, supervisor support and decision authority. According to Sarti, another two elements studied in her research, financial rewards and performance feedback did not have a similar impact on work engagement as the other aforementioned four. Her study was conducted among caregivers in long-term care facilities which might have an effect on the aspect of financial rewards being on a lower level than other elements. In her study, Sarti found that learning opportunity was significantly the highest anticipator of work engagement. Coworker support was the second most relevant predictor of work engagement and supervisor support the third. Decision authority had a slight negative impact on work engagement due to unclear responsibilities and expectation, thus specific guidelines were needed in order to clarify the procedures and measuring one’s work. (Sarti 2014).

Kühnel et al. (2012) examined day-specific work engagement in the light of the aforementioned Job Demands-Resources -model and discovered, that work engagement was best promoted when job demands and job resources correspond. In other words, when an employee gets the resources needed in order to correspond to the demands of the job, one not only performs better, but gets a positive emotional gain as well, thus the sensation of work engagement deepens. For Kühnel et al.’s research, the focus was on day-level work engagement and their research clearly suggested, that job control was essential in handling with time pressures of the work on daily basis. Therefore, they concluded that in order for work engagement to emerge, the employee’s job control needs to co-occur with job’s time pressure. To support this, Kühnel et al. discovered that on high time pressure days, people who had control over their job, time pressure was seen as a positive challenge that triggered better and faster problem-solving skills and higher level of energy whereas low job control caused even withdrawal from tasks, thus disengagement. Kühnel et al. pointed out, that although high time pressure can promote energy and performance, it is essential to have periods of low time pressure as well in order to restore the employees’

motivational resources. (Kühnel et al. 2012).

Christian et al. (2011) studied the antecedents of work engagement and found that job resources are essential for one’s work engagement. They defined that the antecedents consist of three elements: Job characteristics, leadership and dispositional characteristics. Job characteristics included motivational, social and contextual components. The motivational factors related to

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engagement, according to Christian et al. were autonomy, task variety, task significance, feedback, problem solving and job complexity. By social component, Christian et al. mean social support received from supervisors and coworkers and by contextual components they refer to the physical demands and work conditions related to one’s tasks. The second element of antecedents in Christian et al.’s research was leadership, especially transformational leadership and leader-member relationship. And the final, dispositional characteristics, included personality traits such as, conscientiousness, positive affect and proactive personality. According to their research, all elements were essential for work engagement, but the especially critical elements were the two job characteristics: task variety and task significance. (Christian et al. 2011).