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

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21288
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 28, no. 4, Winter 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21288 451

QUALITATIVE STUDY

The Everyday Experiences of

Personal Role Engagement:

What Matters Most?

Luke Fletcher

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.

Key Words: comparative research , employee development , employee

engagement , motivation , qualitative research , thematic analysis , work design

Human resource development scholars and practitioners have welcomed the

concept of employee engagement as an important psychological state that

helps translate HRD practices into positive employee outcomes, such as

This manuscript is based on a portion of a doctoral thesis submitted by Luke Fletcher to the

University of Kent in June 2014. The thesis has been awarded as one of the top nine PhDs in

Management by the European Doctoral Association in Management and Business Administration,

and a short summary was included within their annual journal in 2016.

452 Fletcher

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq

increased performance and retention (Fletcher, 2016 ; Saks & Gruman, 2014 ;

Shuck, Twyford, Reio, & Shuck, 2014 ). Thus, engagement has been argued

to enable “the human spirit to thrive at work” (May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004 ,

p. 12). However, there is much variation across the discipline in terms of

the precise meaning and operationalization of engagement (Shuck, 2011 ).

The concept of engagement first derived from William Kahn ’ s ( 1990 ) eth-

nographic study that examined how people expressed themselves to vary-

ing degrees within their work roles. He described engagement as “personal

role engagement,” which refers to a fluctuating psychological state that, when

fully experienced, signifies the simultaneous and authentic expression of one ’ s

preferred self during role performances, which manifests emotionally, cogni-

tively, and physically. By utilizing a qualitative approach, Kahn ( 1990 ) was

able to develop a distinct and unique concept of motivation that reflects the

“ebbs and flows” of self-in-role adjustments during the course of a person ’ s

working day.

Although research on engagement first originated from, and largely

gives reference to, Kahn ’ s ( 1990 ) concept of personal role engagement, little

research has explicitly focused on Kahn ’ s original conceptualization (Fletcher,

2016 ; Guest, 2014 ). Instead, another conceptualization of engagement

emerged from research on burnout in the early 2000s, which quickly became

adopted by work psychologists. This concept of engagement, labeled “work

engagement,” refers to “a positive, fulfilling work-related state of mind that

is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption … (and) is not focused

on any particular object, event, individual, or behavior” (Schaufeli, Salanova,

González-Romá, & Bakker, 2002 , p. 74). Work engagement is viewed as being

highly related to, yet distinct from, burnout—that is, a negative work-related

psychological state connoting feelings of emotional exhaustion, cynicism,

and depersonalization (Schaufeli et al., 2002 )—and is now the most domi-

nant concept of engagement in use by academics (Bailey, Madden, Alfes, &

Fletcher, 2015 ). Its popularity is, in part, because of its accompanying Utrecht

Work Engagement Scale (UWES) measure (Schaufeli et al., 2002 ) which has

been well validated across many countries (Scaufeli & Bakker, 2010 ), as

well as its relatively parsimonious model of antecedents, the job demands-

resources (JD-R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008 ), which was also origi-

nally developed from research on burnout.

However, this overreliance on the concept and measure of work engage-

ment without fully considering or incorporating Kahn ’ s ( 1990 ) original theo-

rizing is somewhat shortsighted and warrants rectification. This is reflected by

Roe and Inceoglu ( 2016 , p. 73) when they note that engagement “is highly

dynamic and allows for many ways of interpretation … (which) raises the

question of why Kahn ’ s work was not integrated in the research (on work

engagement) by Bakker, Schaufeli and colleagues.” Importantly, the conceptu-

alization of work engagement differs from Kahn ’ s ( 1990 ) personal role engage-

ment concept in that it positions engagement as a fairly stable attitudinal state