What matters for work engagement? A diary study on resources and the benefits of selective optimization with compensation for state work engagement

• Author: Alexander Pundt,Laura Venz,Sabine Sonnentag
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2207

RESEARCH ARTICLE

What matters for work engagement? A diary study on

resources and the benefits of selective optimization with

compensation for state work engagement

Laura Venz |Alexander Pundt |Sabine Sonnentag

University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

Correspondence

Laura Venz, Department of Psychology,

University of Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim,

Germany.

Email: laura.venz@uni‐mannheim.de

Summary

This diary study addresses the benefits of employees' daily use of selective optimization with

compensation (SOC) for state work engagement. We hypothesized that day‐level SOC not only

directly fosters work engagement but that SOC also reveals its beneficial effects for work

engagement in interaction with both external and internal resources. Specifically, we proposed

SOC substitutes for job control, role clarity, and state of being recovered, thus helping employees

manage low daily levels of these resources. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 138

employees who completed two daily surveys over a total of 545 workdays. Results of multilevel

analyses revealed that SOC benefits work engagement in both proposed ways. First, day‐level

SOC was positively related to state work engagement. Additionally, day‐level role clarity and

state of being recovered predicted state work engagement, but day‐level job control did not. Sec-

ond, SOC benefitted state work engagement by offsetting low levels of role clarity and being

recovered, and by boosting job control in their respective relationships with work engagement.

The results suggest that by using SOC at work, employees can actively enhance their own work

engagement on a given workday. This knowledge provides promising starting points for the

development of interventions.

KEYWORDS

diary study, resources, selective optimization with compensation, work engagement

1|INTRODUCTION

Research has consistently illustrated the importance of resources for

employee work engagement (for meta‐analyses, see Crawford, LePine,

& Rich, 2010; Halbesleben, 2010), with resources being “anything per-

ceived by the individual to help attain his or her goals”(Halbesleben,

Neveu, Paustian‐Underdahl, & Westman, 2014, p. 1338). Accordingly,

employees who experience limited resources are less likely to be

engaged (Bakker, Demerouti, & Sanz‐Vergel, 2014). Therefore,

scholars advocated increasing employees' resources in order to facili-

tate work engagement (Bakker et al., 2014). However, although useful

and desirable, interventions targeted at enhancing job resources (e.g.,

job control; S. Chen, Westman, & Eden, 2009) or personal resources

(e.g., a person's state of being recovered; Hahn, Binnewies, Sonnentag,

& Mojza, 2011) are not always possible to implement, leaving

employees in adverse situations of resource shortage.

Our study focuses on employees' active roles in handling such sit-

uations of limited resources. More precisely, we examine if and how

employees themselves can counteract the detrimental consequences

that result from a lack of resources (Halbesleben et al., 2014; Hobfoll,

1989, 2002). In doing so, we employ a dynamic perspective of

resources and work engagement, testing how daily self‐management

strategies enable employees to actively increase their daily work

engagement, particularly when lacking resources on that same day.

With regard to daily self‐management, we focus on employees' use

of a specific set of self‐management strategies, namely, selective opti-

mization with compensation (SOC; P.B. Baltes & Baltes, 1990; see also

Abele & Wiese, 2008). SOC represents the interplay of several cogni-

tive and behavioral strategies, including the selection and prioritization

of goals (e.g., writing a to‐do list), as well as several strategies of goal

pursuit (e.g., concentrating one's effort on finishing the most important

task on one's to‐do list).

Received: 27 April 2016 Revised: 11 April 2017 Accepted: 20 May 2017

DOI: 10.1002/job.2207

26 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:26–38.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job