The Impact of Regulatory Focus on Employee Engagement: The Importance of Job Crafting and Facilitation of Job Resources

Abstract

Employee engagement is a critical topic for organizations today. In Deloitte’s 2014 global study of human capital trends, survey respondents cited engagement as the second most important item in terms of perceived urgency, second only to leadership (Deloitte, 2014).Globalization, rapid transformations in technology, changes in how individuals and organizations collaborate, demographic shifts in the workforce, changes in the social, political and regulatory landscapes that impact the business environment, and the resulting changes in the skills required for an employee to be successful, make it a challenge for organizations to have the right talent base and drive passion and engagement throughout the workforce. This is reflected by only 17% of the respondents to Deloitte’s survey indicating that they were ready to address the trends in employee retention and engagement. This study seeks to provide insights for organizations into employee engagement by hypothesizing and testing whether an individual’s regulatory focus (i.e., promotion versus prevention focus), moderated by their manager’s regulatory focus and their degree of empowerment, impacts their level of engagement at work. Important proposed mediators include an individual’s job crafting behaviors, or a mode of position personalization, and the level of perceived job resources.