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Organizations are keenly interested to find out the causes of work disengagement that are harmful to achieve desired level of performance. Antecedents and levels of work disengagement vary across organizations and sectors due to differences in organizational culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine the antecedents of work disengagement in the public sector organizations.

The research data were obtained from 303 employees of the public sector organizations using the self-administered questionnaires and cluster sampling technique. The research model proposed in this study has been examined by using the regression analysis and Hayes’s (2013) guidelines for moderation.

It is found that work disengagement increases because of managers’ personal preferences, unfairness, above the rule practices, negative political influence, work overload, and a lack of accountability in the workplace. The results reveal a positive association among organizational injustice, organizational politics, work overload, and work disengagement. Moreover, it is also found that organizational injustice is a strongest predictor of work disengagement. Bureaucratic culture of the public sector organizations has a strong strengthening effect on above-stated relationships.

The study has identified various practical implications related to top management, employees, union, and researchers. The study provides new avenues for senior managers of the services sector to eradicate the levels of work disengagement by improving fairness and perception of organizational politics in the workplace.

There is rare literature that investigates the link between work disengagement and organizational injustice, organizational politics, and work overload especially in the presence of interactive effects of a bureaucratic culture. Most of the studies on employee disengagement did not use the unbiased and significant sample size so their results cannot be generalized to larger population. Therefore, the current study has aimed to overcome the shortcomings of previous studies and brings a novel conceptual model on work disengagement.

Guided by the job demands-resources model, this study aims to investigate the underlying mediation mechanisms through which vertical relationship conflict between employees and their supervisors and horizontal relationship conflict between employees and their colleagues escalate into work disengagement. It proposes exhaustion and workplace social isolation as the mediators and explores the relative importance of vertical and horizontal relationship conflicts in influencing work disengagement through the distinct impacts of the mediators.

Data collected from a three-wave study of 181 online-questionnaire respondents are used to test the research model using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Vertical relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via exhaustion, whereas horizontal relationship conflict has an indirect effect on work disengagement via workplace social isolation. Compared with horizontal relationship conflict, vertical relationship conflict exerts a stronger effect on work disengagement.

This study addresses a void in the literature on relationship conflict by investigating work disengagement from the perspective of both vertical and horizontal relationship conflict as well as from the perspective of both strain- and resource-centric mediators (i.e. exhaustion and workplace social isolation, respectively), providing a comparatively detailed analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between permeability, work-family conflict, moral disengagement, behavioral disengagement, job strain and job engagement. In addition, this study aims to determine whether moral disengagement acts as a moderator and mediator in the relationship between work-family conflict and behavioral disengagement.

The authors apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, using a sample of 176 valid responses.

The results indicate that permeability is likely to promote work-family conflict, which in turn may trigger moral disengagement. Moral disengagement may lead to behavioral disengagement, which in turn may increase job strain and decrease job engagement. The findings also show that work-family conflict does not have a significant effect on behavioral disengagement, suggesting that moral disengagement fully mediates the influence of work-family conflict on behavioral disengagement. In addition, the moderating effect of moral disengagement is not significant.

Applying the transactional model of stress and coping theory and the moral disengagement theory, this study contributes to a better understanding of employees' experience of job strain caused by work-family conflict (induced by permeability of IM usage), as well as the employee's coping response.

The article challenges the narrow view in scholarship which presents disengagement as passive and simply the absence of condition of engagement and explores how food retail employees articulate their disengagement within the intensified customer-centric service work. The article adopts the term “active disengagement”, as presented by Ackroyd and Thompson (2016) and empirically examines this as a form of oppositional voice towards managerial norms and behavioural expectations.

The article draws on qualitative data from two case study organisations in the Cypriot food retail sector. Forty-six interviews took place with participants across different departments, including front-line employees and front-line and senior managers, to better understand the research problem through different perspectives.

The data show that disengagement is an integral part of organisational life and it is expressed in an individual and less-risky way. The data also reveal a variation in disengagement actions across departments, depending on employees' mobility on the shop floor and the intensity of interaction with the customers and the line manager. Shop floor employees enjoyed a wider “space of disengagement”, in comparison to those working on the front-end/checkouts. Nevertheless, checkout employees have developed sophisticated actions to express disengagement.

This research provides a refined understanding of active disengagement in organisations. It empirically contributes to the existence of a spectrum of engagement and expands Ackroyd and Thompson's (2016) “active disengagement” framework, discussing it as a form of oppositional voice towards corporate values and the customer-centric work intensification.

The research provides empirical evidence that employee disengagement is not merely the absence of engagement, as HRM scholars and practitioners have argued, but entails further social meanings. This article will be useful for practitioners to rethink, revisit and revise employee engagement programmes in organisations, as well as to re-write corporate values, mission and vision, to also consider employees' experiences within the workplace. This will allow the provision of social support by management to address active disengagement in service organisations.

The study provides an important insight in employees' individual actions to express disengagement towards corporate values and managerial expectations related to customer service. It highlights the variation of dynamics across the food retail shop floor, which has been treated as a contextual periphery within the disengagement debate. Applying a broader lens on retail work heterogeneity, it provides further understanding of the diversity of how frontline service workers express disengagement within the triadic employment relationship. This study offers ground for future research to examine active disengagement in various contexts for better conceptual and practical understanding of this behaviour in organisations.

This chapter explores the nature of disengagement and the role played by emotions while disentangling the overlapping theories and definitions of both engagement and disengagement. We carried out two related studies exploring engagement and disengagement in 10 large UK public and private sector organisations. Both studies used an interpretive approach involving 75 managers and employees. The chapter suggests that emotions play a mediating role in the process of disengagement and the emotional reaction involved provides a distinction to being ‘not engaged’. It highlights the confusion that different approaches bring to distinguishing engagement and disengagement from other job attitudes.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between job characteristics that foster learning (experience with and demand for continuous learning at work, skills variety and autonomy) as potential predictors of self-reported outcomes, such as future learning ability and employee disengagement at work for a cohort of employees with no or very limited job change experience. Further consideration was given to employees’ experiences at work (meaningfulness and recognition at work) as potential mediators in this relationship between job characteristics and employee outcomes.

A cross-sectional design was applied. Participants (N = 284) were recruited from Northern Germany and asked to complete a paper-and-pencil survey. The results were subsequently analyzed using path models to examine direct and indirect effects associated with mediation.

Path model analysis indicated that job characteristics promoting learning at work are positive predictors of self-reported future learning ability and negative predictors of disengagement. Both meaningfulness and recognition predict future learning ability as well. However, these variables only operated as significant mediators in the relationship between job characteristics and employee disengagement (but not self-reported future learning ability).

The study outlines the importance of job characteristics and employee experience to understand employees’ beliefs about their learning ability and engagement at work. The findings highlight the importance of meaningfulness and recognition for employees, as well as the role of learning-supportive job characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the two alternative theoretical explanations of disengagement at work. Following the job demands-resources (JD-R) perspective, the relationship between job complexity and disengagement is tested. In accordance with the process model of burnout, the association between exhaustion and disengagement is examined. The paper also examines conservation of resources (COR) as an integrative framework as far as the moderating role of resilience in both these relationships is concerned.

Survey-based quantitative methodology was followed. A total of 138 employees of an agro-processing unit in North India were surveyed, and 119 usable responses were obtained. Besides the constructs of interest, the questionnaire also sought responses on the relevant demographic variables.

Both job complexity and exhaustion predicted disengagement at work. However, contrary to a negatively hypothesized relationship between job complexity and disengagement, a positive association was found. Resilience was found to be negatively moderating exhaustion-disengagement relationship. No influence of resilience was found on the complexity-disengagement association.

The findings could be specific to the sample and to India. Caution should be exercised while generalizing. Future researchers should validate the findings across contexts.

The results suggest that complexity may not necessarily be perceived as a resource. Hence organizations must invest in training and skill development programs for their workers. Further, managers should assess resilience as an important component while selecting workers.

Contrary findings vis-à-vis job complexity and disengagement could have implications for the JD-R perspective. Further, this research integrates alternative explanations of disengagement employing the COR framework.

This paper investigates the role of psychological contract violation (PCV) as the antecedent of employee turnover intention. It also explores the role of job dissatisfaction and work disengagement as the sequential underlying mechanism of a positive effect of PCV on employee turnover intention.

Drawing on social exchange theory (SET), the authors postulate that PCV triggers negative reciprocity behaviour in employees, which leads to job dissatisfaction and work disengagement, which in turn develop into turnover intentions. The authors tested the research model on time-lagged data from 200 managers working in the banking sector of Pakistan.

The findings confirmed the hypothesis that employees experiencing PCV raise their turnover intentions because of a feeling of organisational betrayal which makes them dissatisfied and detached from their work.

This research advances the body of knowledge in the area of psychological contracts by identifying the mechanisms through which PCVs translate into employee turnover intentions.

The study focuses on the negative implications that an organizational crisis can have for individual employees. Specifically, it considers job-related uncertainty, negative emotions (anxiety and frustration) and job disengagement. Through the lens of the social exchange theory, it is argued that internal crisis communication needs to provide sufficient socioemotional resources to their employees in order to mitigate these negative outcomes. In particular, the study argues for internal crisis communication that fosters organizational transparency and organizational support to achieve these mitigating effects.

An online survey among employees in Austria was administered one year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic – this specific crisis context particularly evoked job-related uncertainty and negative emotions which are considered relevant drivers of job disengagement. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling based on a sample of N = 410.

Results show that employees' perceptions of job-related uncertainty are strongly linked to job-related anxiety and frustration; job-related frustration, in turn, strongly influences job disengagement. Overall, employees' perceptions of organizational transparency and organizational support contribute both to prevent the risk of job disengagement; however, the processes how these effects evolve differ. Whereas organizational transparency works on the cognitive level via a reduction of employees' perceptions of uncertainty, organizational support shows its effect on the emotional level through a reduction of job frustration.

The study contributes to the scarce research on how internal crisis communication can address employees' uncertainty, negative emotions and job disengagement during a crisis. Moreover, despite the lack of organizational responsibility for creating the crisis, the study emphasizes organizational accountability to respond to the needs of its employees to mitigate negative effects.

Taking a social identity approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which age-based stereotype threat mediates the relationships between older workers’ negative age-based metastereotypes and two negative work attitudes: organizational disidentification and work disengagement.

A two-wave cross-sectional design was adopted to collect data from 423 blue-collar older workers of the Portuguese manufacturing sector. Structural equation modeling was used to test the mediation model.

The analyses show that age-based stereotype threat partially mediates the relationship between negative age-based metastereotypes and negative work attitudes. Moreover, findings suggest that older workers respond to negative age-based metastereotypes through threat reactions, and undesirable work attitudes.

This paper contributes to the literature by showing the importance of negative age-based metastereotypes and age-based stereotype threat in workplace dynamics. It also provides evidence that age threats impair the relationship older workers keep with their organization and their work.