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We explore the role of workplace friendships as a lens for understanding the emotional element and relational context for personal engagement (Kahn, 1990). The review of engagement theory differentiates personal engagement, recognizing the role of emotions play in enabling individuals’ “preferred selves.” Workplace relationships and friendship provide a conceptual discussion of individuals in social and workplace roles in engagement, drawing on friendship, emotion, attachment theories, particularly Kahn’s work. A case study drawn from recent research illustrates our discussion before concluding with ideas for the development of a future research agenda in answer to recent calls for work on the social context of engagement.

This study aims to propose a multilevel moderated mediation model of transformational leadership, corporate social responsible, organization-based self-esteem and job engagement to detect Kahn’s theory and predict new product development performance.

This study used a longitudinal study over a six-month period to test the multilevel moderated mediation model. Empirical testing used a survey of 1,655 employees from 165 different R&D work group in Great China.

Transformational leadership, corporate social responsible and organization-based self-esteem well predict employees’ job engagement and new product development performance and are moderated by open discussion of conflict.

This study is the first to propose a multilevel moderated mediation model to detect Kahn’s job engagement theory and predict new product development performance.

The way work engagement is constructed and researched in literature is assumed, at least implicitly, to be gender-neutral where women and men have equal opportunity to demonstrate their engagement in the workplace. This review paper aims to integrate gender into the notion of work engagement in order to examine whether the notion of work engagement is gendered.

The paper is based on a review of the literatures related to work engagement and gendered organisations.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework to develop and explain the notion of gendered work engagement. It shows that work engagement is gendered concept as it is easier for men to demonstrate work engagement than for women.

The paper investigates the gendered nature of work engagement which is an under-explored area.

This study aims to examine the association between workplace spirituality (WPS) and individual’s work engagement (WE) and also the mediating effect of individual’s psychological conditions [psychological meaningfulness (PSYM), psychological safety (PSYS) and psychological availability (PSYA)] on this relationship.

Grounded on Kahn’s personal engagement theory, a model has been developed with WPS as an independent variable, individual’s psychological conditions (PSYM, PSYS and PSYA) as the mediators and individual’s WE as the dependent variable. Based on the online responses from 510 millennial employees working in Fortune 500 manufacturing and service industries operating in India, analysis has been undertaken using confirmatory factor analysis, Pearson correlation and PROCESS macro of Hayes (2017).

WPS has been noted to influence individual’s WE positively and there is a partial mediation of PSYM, PSYS and PSYA on this relationship.

The present study is able to extend the scope of Kahn’s personal engagement theory.

Leaders and HR administrators can use the framework to ensure positive engagement levels for the millennial workforce. It will also help to reduce job dissatisfaction and burnouts at the workplace.

The present study contributes to understanding WE through the lens of WPS. It adds to the existing knowledge by explaining the mediation of the psychological conditions between spirituality and WE among millennials working in India. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered one of the first studies that has attempted to understand the role of WPS and psychological conditions on WE levels of millennials.

I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the applicability of employee engagement theories in a South Asian country, Sri Lanka, and determine whether engagement theories are universally applicable beyond the Western countries in which they have been developed and tested.

A heterogeneous sample of 451 private-sector employees in Sri Lanka was used. A mixed-method design was adopted; quantitative findings were compared with previous studies conducted in Western countries, and qualitative findings enabled a more nuanced understanding of employee engagement in the Sri Lankan context.

Despite cultural differences between Sri Lanka and Western countries, the antecedents of engagement did not manifest differently in a consistent way. Combined results suggest that the different manifestations of engagement in Sri Lanka cannot be attributed solely to cultural variance.

The authors used cross-sectional data and tested only four antecedents of engagement.

This study highlights the importance of multinational organisations' awareness of how employee engagement manifests across different contexts and going beyond cultural adaptation when developing context-specific engagement strategies.

This is among the first studies on an Asian country to examine whether cultural differences impact the antecedents of engagement to empirically test Kahn's (1990) theory of engagement and the motivational process of the job demands-resources theory in a single study and to use a heterogeneous sample and mixed-methods design. The authors challenge the centrality of national culture as a determinant of employee engagement and highlight the importance of considering other contextual factors when examining employee engagement in different countries.

Though employee job engagement has been one of the few most proliferated organizational concepts during the last two decades, evidence on how to achieve an engaged workforce is unclear. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the engagement literature by investigating the role of interpersonal leadership in developing job engagement through the relative importance of deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation as intervening mechanisms.

This study employed an online self-reported survey in data collection, gathering input from 438 frontline service employees in Malaysia. The data was then tested using the structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the proposed parallel mediation model of the study.

The findings demonstrated that deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation were significantly effective in intervening mechanisms through which interpersonal leadership impacted job engagement.

This study offers insightful evidence that can be utilized by service organizations to improve employees' job engagement. The evidence derived from this study suggests that interpersonal leadership is a valuable organizational resource that can help carve pathways through which the objective of employee job engagement can be achieved. Therefore, while crafting organizational interventions for employee job engagement, service managers should address the findings of this study.

Despite the evidence presented in previous literature on the notable relationship between leadership and engagement, there is yet to be an apt understanding of the impact of new leadership perspectives and the intervening mechanisms in predicting job engagement. This study attempts to fill the research gap.

Employees’ job engagement is a key driver for organizational success and competitive advantage. Based on Kahn’s engagement theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between job engagement, transformational leadership, high-performance human resource (HR) practices, climate for innovation, and contextual performance.

A questionnaire survey, conducted at two different points in time, was employed to collect data from 394 pairs of Vietnamese university academics and their leaders. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel SEM using the Statistical Package for Social Science Version 24 and Mplus Version 7.4.

The findings indicated that transformational leadership and high-performance HR practices were key drivers of employees’ job engagement. A climate for innovation contributed effectively to mediate the effect of transformational leadership on employees’ job engagement. Further, employees’ job engagement was positively and significantly related to contextual performance.

The short time lag between the two data collection phases might limit the ability to reach definite causal conclusions. Future research using a longitudinal design is needed to provide stronger validation for the underlying model.

This study is a rare attempt that investigates the process from which employees’ job engagement is generated and contributes to improve contextual performance in the higher education sector.

The purpose of this paper is to examine organizational identification as an underlying mechanism for how perceptions of interpersonal leadership are related to employee engagement, and its relationship with commitment and job tension.

A sample of 451 full-time employees at an international firm completed a web-based survey.

Organizational identification mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal leadership and engagement, which mediated the relationship between perceived interpersonal leadership and commitment. Engagement mediated the relationship between identification and job tension.

Limitations include cross-sectional data. Strengths include a large field sample. Implication is that leaders who encourage employees’ identification with the organization may also encourage their engagement.

Interpersonal leadership characteristics can be developed, and are positively related to employees’ identification, commitment, and engagement, which are negatively related to job tension.

Interpersonal leaders are positively associated with employees’ engagement; high engagement has been related to positive employee health and well-being. A healthy workforce translates into a healthy society.

This study is one of the few to examine the underlying mechanisms through which leadership relates to engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to advance research on the newly developed construct of respectful engagement (RE) (Carmeli et al., 2015), which focuses on positive interrelating behaviors characterized by respect in the organizational context. Further, this study aims to examine whether RE was associated with task performance and affective organizational commitment, and whether employee job engagement mediated these relationships.

Using the self-reported measures and online survey method, data were collected from 185 employees working in one of the world’s largest hosiery firms located in the eastern part of Punjab, Pakistan. Structural equation modeling and multiple regressions were used to test the proposed conceptual model.

RE had significant positive effects on task performance and affective commitment. The effect of RE on affective commitment was stronger than it was on task performance. Moreover, job engagement significantly mediated the effects of RE on task performance and affective commitment.

This study provides empirical evidence that RE enhances job engagement of employees by improving their levels of effort, enthusiasm and pride and concentration in work roles. Consequently, the enhanced level of job engagement leads employees to demonstrate better task performance and increased affective commitment with the organization.

Managers can institutionalize RE by applying strategies suggested by (Dutton, 2003) that focus on conveying presence, being genuine, communicating affirmation, effective listening and supportive communication. Training programs around these strategies can help managers to achieve this goal. Furthermore, in their day-to-day performance discussions, managers should follow the above strategies that could open further avenues for RE at the workplace. Managers can also allocate some weight to employees’ RE as part of their performance appraisals. The use of rewards would encourage employees to adopt RE as a norm desired by the organization.

This study extends research on the new developed construct of RE by focusing on task performance and affective commitment as its key outcomes. Furthermore, this study is the first to introduce job engagement as mediator in the relationship of RE with task performance and affective commitment. Another important aspect of this study is that its model has been tested on the data collected from Pakistan, which is an underrepresented geographical region in the management literature.