Work engagement interventions can be effective: a systematic review

By Caroline Knight, Malcolm Patterson, J. Dawson. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2019

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Work engagement is associated with important individual and organisational outcomes (e.g. employee health and well-being, performance). This narrative systematic review aims to synthesise the increasing number of work engagement interventions and inform future research by exploring: (1) the specific intervention foci, delivery methods and content of engagement interventions; (2) intervention effectiveness; and (3) underlying mediators and moderators. A systematic search for interventions employing a validated engagement measure revealed 40 studies. Five were personal resource building, twelve job resource building, three leadership training, eighteen health promotion, and two job and personal resource building. Twenty (50%) studies observed significant positive effects on work engagement, two (5%) had a negative effect, and eighteen (45%) had no effect. Job and personal resources, job demands and well-being were important mediators. Moderators included the specific intervention focus and delivery method, employee participation, manager support, and intervention level (top-down vs bottom-up). Bottom-up interventions, and job crafting and mindfulness interventions particularly, were most successful. Implementation difficulties were common, including poor response and attrition rates, and adverse factors (e.g. organisational restructuring, redundancy, economic downturn). We highlight implications for research and practice and stress the need to test underlying theories to build knowledge around how, why, and when interventions work.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8ab8313f648b2994bb59c23afea452e5b9992ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. T. Lesener
2. Anna Jochmann
3. B. Gusy
4. C. Wolter
5. Arnold B. Bakker

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. T. Lesener
2. Anna Jochmann
3. B. Gusy
4. C. Wolter
5. Arnold B. Bakker

In Social Psychology

1. T. Lesener
2. Anna Jochmann
3. B. Gusy
4. C. Wolter
5. Arnold B. Bakker

Citations in the corpus

• The drivers of work engagement: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal evidence (2020, methodology): “Also, Landis (2013) recommends TSSEM as the method of choice for meta-analytic structural equation modelling if at least one study provides a full correlation matrix. Following Cheung and Chan (2005), we first combined all relevant effect sizes of the primary studies into a series of matrices to cal”