Antecedents and outcomes of work engagement: The role of mindsets

Abstract

Antecedents and outcomes of work engagement are of prime interest to scientists and practitioners. Antecedents, such as personal and job resources, explain how work engagement can be leveraged, while observed variance in outcomes are markers of the incremental value of work engagement. Essentially, this thesis investigated the influences of mindsets (as personal resources) on work engagement and on its outcomes. Two discrete mindsets were studied, the incremental mindset of job capability and the incremental mindset of emotion. Each mindset is associated with specific selfregulatory variables: The incremental mindset of job capability with learning goal orientation and avoid performance goal orientation, and the incremental mindset of emotion with adaptive emotion regulation and avoid goal orientation for emotion. Outcomes associated with the incremental mindset of job capability were proactive learning behaviours of proactive learning and development, feedback inquiry, feedback monitoring, and knowledge sharing. Outcomes relating to the incremental mindset of emotion were subjective well-being comprising of happiness, life satisfaction, and psychosomatic complaints. The effects of each mindset were tested through a sequential process model. In this model, mindset was linked to work engagement through the mediating roles of self-regulatory variables. Furthermore, self-regulatory variables and work engagement were construed as competing predictors of work engagement outcomes. In each mindset model, the self-regulatory variables had the same level of specificity as the outcomes — maximising the highest possible association. Thus, this configuration allowed for a robust test of work engagement’s incremental value, specifically given that work engagement and the self-regulatory variables do not share similar conceptual space. This also served to test the hypothesized partial mediating role of work engagement between resources and outcomes. Finally, the complex longitudinal dynamics of the work engagement-outcomes links were also investigated. The mindset models were tested with structural equation modelling (SEM). In the first instance, each model was tested using a convenience sample of employees from an online panel (N = 410). These studies served as preliminary investigations to explore and check model specifications as many propositions within the models were novel. Next, the models were tested with another sample of employees from a different online panel. A repeated-measures design was used with a time lag of 3.5 months (N = 694 at Time 1, and N = 370 at Time 2). At the cross-sectional level, the effect of the incremental mindset of job capability on work engagement through the mediating role of learning goal orientation was supported. Work engagement explained incremental variance in knowledge sharing only, while learning goal orientation explained variance in all outcomes. Longitudinally the causal nexus between the incremental mindset of job capability and work engagement was not supported. On the contrary, Time 1 work engagement predicted Time 2 leaning goal orientation, supporting a hypothesised alternative model. Time 1 work engagement predicted Time 2 feedback inquiry. Furthermore, Time 1 Knowledge sharing and Time 1 proactive learning and development predicted Time 2 work engagement — supporting the notion that these outcomes are preferably viewed as predictors of work engagement. Cross-sectional results of the incremental mindset of emotion model supported the effect of the incremental mindset of emotion on work engagement, mediated concurrently by adaptive emotion regulation and avoid performance goal orientation for emotion. However, this mediational nexus was unsupported over time. At the cross-sectional level, controlling for adaptive emotion regulation, work engagement explained incremental variance in happiness and life satisfaction. In the same vein, controlling for avoid performance goal orientation for emotion, work engagement showed incremental variance in psychosomatic complaints. Time 1 work engagement predicted Time 2 happiness and Time 2 life satisfaction, but it did not predict Time 2 psychosomatic complaints. Conversely, Time 1 happiness predicted Time 2 work engagement but support for a reciprocal relationship between work engagement and happiness was not found. Finally, Time 1 life satisfaction did not predict Time 2 work engagement. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of (1) a much needed rethink of the incremental value of work engagement and the mediational role of work engagement between resources and outcomes, (2) the approach-avoidance dimension of work engagement and the nature of the UWES scale, (3) the uniqueness of each work engagement-outcome link, and (4) the organisational context in which work engagement is investigated and how this may optimally affect the quality of the work engagement-outcome links.