Antecedents, Consequences, and Context of Employee Engagement in Nonprofit Organizations
| Author | Kunle Akingbola,Herman A. van den Berg |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0734371X16684910 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
Review of Public Personnel Administration
2019, Vol. 39(1) 46 –74
Antecedents, Consequences,
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Engagement in Nonprofit
Organizations
Kunle Akingbola1 and Herman A. van den Berg1
Abstract
The article draws on Kahn and Saks to examine the extent to which specific
nonprofit antecedents affect engagement and how engagement mediates employee
and organizational consequences. Our findings suggest that the consequences of
job and organization engagement are the behavioral outcomes—job satisfaction,
commitment, and organization citizenship behavior—that nonprofits consider as
critical to their organization and the employees emphasize. Perhaps the strongest
evidence of the impact of engagement is the finding that nonprofit employees are
more likely to experience these consequences and less likely to have intention
to quit even if antecedents such as job characteristics and value congruence are
less likely. Consistent with the literature, we also found that value congruence is a
major antecedent in the relationship between nonprofit employees, their jobs, and
the organization. Our research presents one of the first findings that result from
empirically validated measures of engagement in nonprofits.
Keywords
employee engagement, employee attitudes, behavior, and motivation, social exchange,
nonprofit HRM
The interest in employee engagement has generated a sustained discourse about the
meaning and the relationship between the construct and employee and organizational
outcomes. However, there remains a need to better understand different elements and
1Lakehead University, Orillia, Ontario, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Kunle Akingbola, Associate Professor, Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead University, 500
University Avenue, Orillia, Ontario L3V 0B9, Canada.
Email: kakingbola@lakeheadu.ca
Akingbola and van den Berg
47
application of the concept especially the contextual, process, and institutional factors
that contribute to, or that result from, engagement (Truss, Shantz, Soane, Alfes, &
Delbridge, 2013). For example, how do employee characteristics play into engage-
ment? Also related is the question of how engagement manifests in organizations with
certain institutional drivers. The way these questions are framed and explored will not
only help us to place employee engagement in context but also help us to understand
its interaction with societal and organizational systems, values, and players.
In response to calls for research to examine how contextual and institutional factors
contribute to engagement (Truss et al., 2013), we draw on Kahn’s (1990) theory of job
engagement, and Saks’s (2006) multidimensional approach, to examine the relation-
ship between antecedents and consequences of employee engagement in nonprofit
organizations (NPOs). Despite the increasing body of research on employee engage-
ment (Macey & Schneider, 2008; Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010), there is minimal
empirical research that has focused specifically on employee engagement in NPOs.
Our research aims to address this omission by investigating the empirical evidence of
the factors that underlie employee engagement and their relationship within the unique
context of NPOs. We draw on research to examine the antecedents, that is, factors that
are in play and could contribute to or influence nonprofit employees to be engaged.
The association of these factors with organizational outcomes in NPOs was also cen-
tral to our research. The core focus of the research was to gain a better understanding
of the extent to which specific nonprofit antecedents could impact engagement and
how engagement mediates employee and organizational consequences. The character-
istics of nonprofits and the behavioral orientation of their employees underlie this
research (Akingbola, 2013b; Kim, 2005; Ridder & McCandless, 2010).
Next, we present an overview of the theoretical perspectives that have been used to
explain engagement. We emphasize and draw on the conceptualization of Kahn (1990)
and Saks (2006) to identify the core antecedents of engagement and their relationship
with consequences in nonprofit organizations. Following a review of the data and
methodology, we present an analysis of the results and discussion. We conclude the
article with the implications for nonprofit managers and opportunities for future
research.
Theoretical Perspectives
In many ways, the end point of the old constructs such as motivation, commitment,
empowerment, and job involvement is the starting point of employee engagement
(Macey & Schneider, 2008; Wefald & Downey, 2009). The concept of engagement
extends the explanation of how employees deploy the self in job performance beyond
the focus on a single psychological component. This divergence is exemplified in the
original conceptualization of job engagement in Kahn (1990). To be engaged, employ-
ees have to fully apply the personal self in terms of their physical, cognitive, and
emotional energy in the performance of their job (Kahn, 1990). In contrast, employees
are disengaged when there is a disconnection of the personal self from the work roles.
Disengagement means that employees withdraw or fail to apply their physical,
48
Review of Public Personnel Administration 39(1)
cognitive, or emotional energy in the performance of their job (Kahn, 1990). Kahn
(1990) opined that employees, in determining whether to be engaged or disengaged,
unconsciously consider three questions that focus on meaningfulness, safety, and
availability in relation to their job. Particularly, employees ask, (a) How meaningful is
it for me to bring myself into this performance? (b) How safe is it to do so? and (c)
How available am I to do so? (Kahn, 1990). The presence of meaningfulness, safety,
and availability, influence employees to be engaged, while their absence, conversely,
causes employees to be disengaged.
The meaning and explanation of employee engagement has evolved through differ-
ent but interrelated theoretical pathways (see, for example, Maslach, Schaufeli, &
Leiter, 2001; Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, & Bakker, 2002; Shuck, Reio, &
Rocco, 2011). Following the emergence of the concept, one subsequent perspective
posited that engagement is a positive affective state and the antithesis of burnout
(Maslach et al., 2001), while another operationalized and extended this proposition
with empirical measures (Schaufeli et al., 2002). The latter conceptualization also
added affective behavior, such as enthusiasm, attachment to the job, and the ability to
overlook difficulties in work role, to the meaning of engagement.
Drawing on social exchange theory, Saks (2006) differentiated between job engage-
ment and organization engagement. As explained above, the original conceptualiza-
tion of engagement emphasizes the psychological connection of employees to their
work role (Kahn, 1990). In addition to their job, employees also have a role as mem-
bers of the organization (Saks, 2006). The organizational role is the basis of organiza-
tion engagement. Saks explained that organization engagement could be conceptualized
as the greater investment of the self for higher job performance, in response to organi-
zational factors or decisions (Saks, 2006). This conceptualization introduced a multi-
dimensional approach to the meaning of engagement. Although it overlaps with job
engagement, this approach suggests that the antecedents and consequences of job
engagement and organization engagement are not necessarily the same.
Although this research draws from Kahn’s (1990) and Saks’s (2006) conceptualiza-
tion of engagement, one can summarize the theoretical perspectives that have explained
employee engagement into five broad perspectives: (a) Kahn’s (1990) need-satisfying
approach, (b) Maslach et al.’s (2001) burnout-antithesis approach, (c) Harter, Schmidt,
and Hayes’s (2002) satisfaction–engagement approach, (d) Saks’s (2006) multidimen-
sional approach, and (e) Barrick, Thurgood, Smith, and Courtright’s (2015) collective
engagement approach (see, for example, Shuck, 2011). The recent additions to the
theorization suggest that engagement can manifest at an organizational level through
social processes that facilitate shared perception and a degree of homogeneity in terms
of characteristics and values of employees (Barrick et al., 2015). This organizational
engagement conceptualization implies that employees can collectively invest their full
selves into their work roles.
For NPOs, Kahn’s (1990) original conceptualization of engagement and Saks’s
(2006) multidimensional approach offer a particularly relevant blended framework for
the examination of the antecedents and consequences of the construct. To understand
the dimensions of engagement in NPOs, our research combines the two overlapping
Akingbola and van den Berg
49
Figure 1. Model of the antecedents and consequences with both organization and job
engagement mediators.
conceptualizations to explain the core antecedents of engagement and their relation-
ship with outcomes in NPOs. We underlie the research objectives with a focus on how
engagement is related to the...
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