Is the Role of Work Engagement Essential to Employee Performance or ‘Nice to Have’?

Woocheol Kim,Jiwon Park,Soo Han

doi:10.3390/su11041050

Woocheol Kim, Jiwon Park + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su11041050

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Abstract

The current study aimed to scrutinize roles of work engagement as a mediator in the relationships between job and personal resources and employees’ outcomes, namely job performance and turnover intention, specifically focusing on testing the essentiality of work engagement. A total of 571 complete responses from full-time employees in Korean organizations were utilized for data analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM). This study analyzed two research models through the competing model approach: One model (Model 1) specified that job and personal resources directly influence job performance and turnover intention and also indirectly influence job performance and turnover intention through work engagement, whereas the other model (Model 2) specified that job and personal resources only indirectly influence turnover intention and job performance through work engagement. The results of the competing models demonstrated that overall, Model 2 adequately fit better than Model 1. The results also showed that the direct effects of job and personal resources on work engagement, as well as the direct effects of work engagement on job performance and turnover intention were statistically significant. In addition, the results of the study revealed statistically significant mediating effects of work engagement, not only on the relationship between job and personal resources and job performance, but also on the relationship between job and personal resources and turnover intention. Based on the results, theoretical and practical implications for human resource management, limitations, and recommendations for further research are discussed.

Highlights

The issue of organizational sustainability has increasingly received a lot of research attention as it turned out that sustainable organizations positively contribute to multiple aspects of the society, including economic, environmental, and social dimensions [1,2]
This study focused on three personal resources: Optimism, self-efficacy, and organizational-based self-esteem [11,14,30,31]
We have summarized the main conclusions from the literature review as follows: (1) The basic assumption was made based on social exchange theory (SET) that people tend to engage in work more actively and produce positive work outcomes when they receive positive support from the job; (2) the previous studies demonstrated the importance of work engagement to employees’ job performance by considering other variables, such as personal resources and job resources even though not many studies examined both personal and job resources in the same model; (3) most previous research on work engagement relied on survey instruments; and (4) the majority of studies have used engagement as a mediator

Summary

Introduction

The issue of organizational sustainability has increasingly received a lot of research attention as it turned out that sustainable organizations positively contribute to multiple aspects of the society, including economic, environmental, and social (human) dimensions [1,2]. Over the last two decades, scholars in the field of human resource and organizational behaviors have paid great attention to employees’ sustainable engagement at their work as to the way of being beneficial in human performance. Since several scholars, such as Shuck and Wollard [3], triggered fervent discussions of meanings and roles of work engagement of employees in the workplace (e.g., what work engagement means; why it matters; and what strategic interventions can be made in the Human Resource Development perspective), myriad theoretical and empirical studies on work engagement to explain and verify its importance in relation to various consequences in an organization have been conducted. Does work engagement play a crucial role as a mediator in the relationships of job and personal resources with job performance?

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