| Job engagement has recently become a fashionable term among Human Resource practitioners and Organizational Behavior researchers. However, academic research that has theoretically examined job engagement at the psychological level is limited, as is research on the nature of employee engagement, and its place among other job attitude constructs that are used to describe employees at work. I developed and validated a new measure of job engagement that assessed people's engagement during role performance. The predictive, convergent, and discriminant validity of job engagement was assessed with similar affective and cognitive work-related states, including job involvement, job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale.; Results from confirmatory factor analysis indicated that job engagement was best represented as a higher-order factor with three lower-order dimensions of physical, emotional, and cognitive. Additional analyses suggested that the four job attitudes of job engagement, job satisfaction, job involvement, and intrinsic motivation are distinct but correlated attitudes. Hierarchical regression results revealed that employees who exhibited higher levels of job engagement were rated by their supervisors as demonstrating higher levels of task and contextual performance and lower levels of withdrawal behaviors. Importantly, these relationships were found after controlling for job satisfaction, job involvement, and intrinsic motivation. Specifically, job engagement predicted an additional 3% variance in task performance, an additional 4% variance in contextual performance, and an additional 10% variance in withdrawal behaviors. Moreover, job engagement predicted an additional 3% variance in task performance, an additional 6% variance in contextual performance, and an additional 7% variance in withdrawal behaviors over and above that predicted by the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. I conclude with theoretical and practical implications as well as suggestions for future research. |
