How can personal development lead to increased engagement? The roles of meaningfulness and perceived line manager relations

Abstract

There is an increasing need to understand the psychological processes that link personal development with employee engagement, particularly the boundary conditions at which these occur. The current study sought to meet this need by testing whether perceived opportunities for development are positively associated with job engagement indirectly through the experience of meaningfulness, and whether this indirect relationship is conditional on the level of perceived line manager relations. Questionnaire data was collected from 152 UK workers from a range of occupations and organizations. The results found support for all the hypotheses. In particular, the positive effects of perceived opportunities for development on job engagement (measured one month later) via meaningfulness was only significant for those who perceived that they had a good relationship with their line manager. Thus, there is a need for line managers to develop high quality relationships with their direct reports in order for development practices to translate into positive psychological outcomes. Engagement theory could be advanced by further understanding broaden-and-build and social exchange processes. IntroductionProviding opportunities for personal development is a crucial practice within a human resource management (HRM) system because such opportunities develop human capital resources within the organization, which enable sustained competitive advantage (Lee & Bruvold, 2003). Moreover, opportunities for development are important for facilitating employee engagement (Bakker & Bal, 2010;Sarti, 2014;Shuck, Twyford, Reio, & Shuck, 2014). Engagement is defined as the authentic, simultaneous expression of one's emotional, cognitive, and physical dimensions of the self whilst performing one's job role (Kahn, 1990).In doing so, personal development connects the individual with their work context because "they provide pathways for employee growth and fulfillment" (Crawford, Rich, Buckman, & Bergeron, 2014, p.61). Over recent years initiatives to improve employee engagement have become widespread because of their potential to leverage organizational success through harnessing the motivation and spirit of its employees (Saks & Gruman, 2014). As HRM practitioners are often responsible for leading organizational change initiatives that seek to improve employee engagement through human resource (HR) practices (Arrowsmith & Parker, 2013;Reissner & Pagan, 2013), and given that a recent evidence synthesis shows that employee perceptions of development are associated with engagement (Bailey, Madden, Alfes, & Fletcher, 2015), it may be particularly useful for HRM researchers to examine the psychological processes that underpin the relationship between personal development and engagement in more depth. Currently, there is a lack of understanding of how personal development leads to engagement, and in what circumstances this process occurs. This is important to address because it provides practical recommendations on how development practices can be best desi...

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