Meaningful Work, Job Resources, and Employee Engagement

Simon L. Albrecht · Camille R. Green · Andrew Marty

162 citations0/0 files storedSustainability

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior Employee Performance and Management Workaholism, burnout, and well-being

Abstract

Meaningful work and employee engagement have been the subject of increasing interest in organizational research and practice over recent years. Both constructs have been shown to influence important organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, wellbeing, and performance. Only a limited amount of empirical research has focused on understanding the relationship within existing theoretical frameworks. For this study, meaningful work is proposed as a critical psychological state within the job demands-resources (JD-R) model that can therefore, in part, explain the relationship between job resources and employee engagement. Survey data collected from 1415 employees working in a range of organizations, across a number of industries, were analyzed with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM). In support of expectations, job variety, development opportunities, and autonomy, each had a significant and positive direct association with meaningful work. These job resources also had a significant and positive indirect effect on employee engagement via meaningful work. Although job variety, development opportunities, autonomy, and feedback had significant positive direct associations with engagement, contrary to expectations, supervisor support had a negative association with engagement. The final model explained a sizable proportion of variance in both meaningful work (49%) and employee engagement (65%). Relative weights analyses showed that job variety was the strongest job resource predictor of meaningful work, and that meaningful work was more strongly associated with employee engagement than the job resources. Overall, the results show that meaningful work plays an important role in enhancing employee engagement and that providing employees with skill and task variety is important to achieving that goal. Practical implications, study limitations, and future research opportunities are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 162 citations exist upstream.

References

1999Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives 1988Structural equation modeling in practice: A review and recommended two-step approach.2000The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior 2001The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.2011Sources of Method Bias in Social Science Research and Recommendations on How to Control It 2007The Job Demands‐Resources model: state of the art 1990PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT AND DISENGAGEMENT AT WORK.2002The Measurement of Engagement and Burnout: A Two Sample Confirmatory Factor Analytic Approach

Cited by

2023Meaningful Work, Happiness at Work, and Turnover Intentions 2023Creating meaningful work for employees: The role of inclusive leadership 2021The impact of work engagement and meaningful work to alleviate job burnout among social workers in New Zealand 2024Does artificial intelligence improve hospitality employees’ individual competitive productivity? A time-lagged moderated-mediation model involving job crafting and meaningful work

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.