Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: A multilevel study

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Author: Mark W. Gilman,Catherine Bailey,Luke Fletcher
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12168

s_bs_banner

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement

within the working day: A multilevel study

Luke Fletcher

1

|Catherine Bailey

2

|Mark W. Gilman

3

1

Aston Business School, Aston University,

Birmingham, UK

2

Department of Business and Management,

Jubilee Building, University of Sussex,

Brighton, UK

3

Birmingham City Business School,

Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

Correspondence

Luke Fletcher, Aston Business School, Aston

University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK.

Email: l.fletcher1@aston.ac.uk

Funding information

University of Kent, Grant/Award Number: PhD

Scholarship; Kent Business School and the

University of Kent

Abstract

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the

psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety

serve as mechanisms throughwhich the work context duringdiscrete

situations within the workday influences “state”engagement. We

further theorised that a person's “trait”level of engagement would

exert cross‐level effects on the state level relationships. Multilevel

analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations

and 1,446 situational observationsrevealed that meaningfulness and

availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between

perceptions of the work context and state engagement. High levels

of trait engagement strengthenedthe within‐personrelation between

availability and state engagement, yet weakened the within‐person

relation between meaningfulness and state engagement, suggesting

two differentprocesses may be at play. Overall,the findings advance

our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally

dynamic psychological phenomenon and promote a contextually

based HRM approachto facilitating engagement.

KEYWORDS

availability, meaningfulness, personal role engagement,resources,

safety

1|INTRODUCTION

Engagementhas emerged as a relevant anduseful concept within the humanresource management(HRM) domain as it

may helpto explain how HRM facilitatespositive employeeoutcomes (Alfes,Truss, Soane, Rees, & Gatenby,2013; Saks &

Gruman,2014; Truss, Shantz,Soane, Alfes, & Delbridge,2013). Recently,it has been proposed that engagementoperates

at two distinctlevels: as a steady, enduringmindset (“trait engagement”)and as an experience that fluctuates overtime

(“state engagement”) due to changesin an individual's perception of their workcontext (Bakker, 2014, 2015). In lightof

this,there have been calls formore studies that explorethe antecedents ofthese momentary fluctuationsin engagement,

such as fromone situation to another (Bakker,2014; Ilies, Aw, & Pluut, 2015;Saks & Gruman, 2014). This also alignswith

calls for more researchon the “lived”experience of engagement that can informHRM scholarship (Purcell,2014; Truss

Received: 14 July 2015 Revised: 18 July 2017 Accepted: 28 July 2017

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12168

128 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Hum Resour Manag J. 2018;28:128–147.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj

et al., 2013), for example, how employees' experiences of organisational practicesshapes employee behaviour through

the state of engagement (Alfes etal., 2013; Conway, Fu, Monks, Alfes,& Bailey, 2016; Fletcher,2016).

Recently, Bakker (2015) has suggested that more enduring “trait”engagement may act as a moderator for the

within‐person processes that underpin “state”engagement and has argued that examining both within‐person (or state)

and between‐person (or trait) processes together will enable further insight into the multilevel nature of engagement

(Ilies, Aw et al., 2015; Ilies, Pluut et al., 2015). Such studies will address the need for research that furthers our under-

standing of the multilevel nature of various phenomena within the HRM domain (Shen, Messersmith, & Jiang, 2017).

To address these calls, we focus on the antecedents of state engagement during discrete situations that arise

during the course of the working day, and how individuals' levels of trait engagement influence these experiences.

The main aims of the current paper are to (a) examine how and under what circumstances individuals might experi-

ence ebbs and flows in their state engagement during discrete situations within the working day and (b) test whether

a person's level of trait engagement may influence the psychological processes that underpin state engagement.

To align with the interests of HRM scholars, we focus on Kahn's (1990) conceptualisation of personal role engage-

ment rather than the more widely used conceptualisation of “work engagement”as a higher‐order construct comprising

vigour, dedication, and absorption in work activities (Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez‐roma, & Bakker, 2002). The concept

of personal role engagement offers the potential to bridge the gap between psychologicalstudies of engagement on the

one hand, and the broader interests of the HRM community on the other, by emphasising the contextualised experi-

ence of engagement (Jenkins & Delbridge, 2013). A growing number of HRM scholars have been concerned that the

developing field of work engagement is acontextual and potentially unrealistic in its depiction of lived experiences at

work (Purcell, 2014). Conversely, Kahn's (1990) conceptualisation of personal role engagement as a deep, fulfilling psy-

chological state associated with the expression of the authentic self at work is more aligned with notions of situated

human agency (Cole, Walter, Bedeian, & O'Boyle, 2012; Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010; Saks & Gruman, 2014).

Kahn's (1990) theoretical framework focuses on three psychological conditions, meaningfulness, availability and

safety, which together must be present for the full experience of personal role engagement to occur. It has been

argued that this framework is both parsimonious and comprehensive, and thus enables a better understanding of

the antecedents of engagement (Crawford, Rich, Buckman, & Bergeron, 2014; Saks & Gruman, 2014). Moreover,

Kahn's (1990) theorising focuses on the mediating role that specific psychological conditions play in connecting the

wider work context with the experience of personal role engagement. In this sense, Kahn's (1990) theorising aligns

closely with the HRM literature concerning the role of mediating variables (Boxall, Guthrie, & Paauwe, 2016). Lastly,

Kahn (1990) offers a multilevel perspective on engagement that addresses HRM interests (Shen et al., 2017), as he

considers the “discrete moments”in peoples' work lives within a broader social and organisational setting.

Despite Kahn's (1990) suggestion that variations in engagement levels within the working day are an inevitable

feature of the experience of state engagement, very little research that adopts the personal role engagement

perspective has examined how engagement levels fluctuate in relation to specific situations (Roe & Inceoglu, 2016).

In consequence, our knowledge of the engaging potential of individual work tasks and situations is limited (Saks &

Gruman, 2014), and the utility of Kahn's (1990) framework for understanding state level engagement has been

neglected (Roe & Inceoglu, 2016).

In all, personal role engagement may hold promise in addressing the concerns of HRM scholars (e.g., Boxall et al.,

2016; Purcell, 2014; Shen et al., 2017), as Kahn's (1990) theorising focuses not only on relevant mediating processes,

that is, psychological conditions but also on advancing a multilevel, contextualised understanding of engagement.We

address these identified gaps in the engagement literature by testing a multilevel model that uses Kahn's (1990)

engagement construct. Our model is illustrated in Figure 1.

Specifically, we develop four sets of hypotheses grounded in Kahn's (1990) theorising on personal role engage-

ment and supplement and advance this understanding by drawing on insights from more recent theories and models.

First, we draw on the job demands‐resources (JD‐R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008) and the literature on daily

work events to propose positive associations between the situational work context and state engagement. Second,

we utilise broaden‐and‐build (B&B) theory (Fredrickson, 2001) to argue that the psychological conditions of

FLETCHER ET AL.129

s_bs_banner