The Everyday Experiences of Personal Role Engagement: What Matters Most?

Abstract

Despite increasing interest from the HRD community, little is known about how personal role engagement is experienced in everyday work situations and which factors are most important for facilitating or thwarting such experiences. A total of 124 employees from six U.K. organizations were interviewed about the factors that heighten versus reduce their everyday experiences of the emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of personal role engagement. Template analysis revealed that task, relational, and organizational resources were the most relevant for heightened personal role engagement whereas relational and organizational hindrances were the most prominent for reduced personal role engagement. There was some variation in the salience of task and personal resources as well as challenge demands across organizational settings. Moreover, resources and demands seemed to influence personal role engagement through the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and, to some degree, safety. This study is one of the first to qualitatively explore the everyday experience of personal role engagement. In doing so, it provides deeper insight into how an HRD approach to engagement can be further advanced with an appreciation of the situational and organizational context.

Mind the context gap: a critical review of engagement within the public sector and an agenda for future research

“…Johns (2006, p.391) Jenkins and Delbridge (2013) provides an illustration of how a contextual approach to studying engagement can be undertaken within the HRM discipline. We would also encourage engagement researchers to consider how to capture some of these wider contextual features when conducting data collection activities so that these can be at least reported on when contextualizing the study; for example, Fletcher's (2017) qualitative study exploring the situational context of personal role engagement also considered variation across different organizational settings.…”

“…Hence most engagement research applies a general framework of job resources that tends to focus on job autonomy, co-worker support, and opportunities for development. Differentiating between specific types of resources, such as personal, job, organizational, and relational resources, and examining differences between sectors/institutional settings may also help further advance our contextual understanding of which resources are most important (Fletcher, 2017). More specifically, for the engagement of public sector workers, Borst (2018) makes a starting point by positioning autonomy as a public sector-specific resource, which he finds differs in salience for the engagement of public workers across different institutional settings.…”

Does Compassion Matter in Leadership? A Two‐Stage Sequential Equal Status Mixed Method Exploratory Study of Compassionate Leader Behavior and Connections to Performance in Human Resource Development

“…Indeed, we might predict that compassionate leadership be associated with these well‐known styles in overlapping ways. To take this research to the next level and establish the bounds of discriminate validity, scholars might collect time wave data across multiple points of contact or utilize a diary study methodology (Fletcher, ) to more closely examine the nuances of compassion alongside well‐regarded and timeless theories of leadership as a direct extension of our work.…”

“…For example, a study looking at each subscale of compassionate leadership juxtaposed on top of measures of transformational leadership theory or authentic leadership (Kiersch & Byrne, ) would help establish advanced levels of discriminate and nomological validity. Interested scholars could follow the steps outlined by Shuck, Nimon, and Zigarmi () for nomological network mapping or Fletcher () for more detailed information on utilizing a diary study methodology. We intentionally point readers to these two manuscripts as both had employee engagement at their core, which, was a connected variable used in our overall model.…”

Chief Executive Officers’ Perceptions of Collective Organizational Engagement and Patient Experience in Acute Care Hospitals

“…A key implication of this research for hospital leaders is that employee engagement and patient experience enhancement initiatives should be strategically integrated. Hospital leaders should ensure that these 2 types of programs are designed in an integrated, coordinated effort and not developed in 2 separate silos within a hospital organization (31,53). In addition, many of the employee engagement improvement initiatives at acute care hospitals are focused on clinicians, especially nurses (54,55), often overlooking other key employees who augment patient experience such as cooks, housekeepers, and those who work in billing and admitting (39).…”