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Building on Kahn's (1990) ethnographic work, a field study in a U.S. Midwestern insurance company explored the determinants and mediating effects of three psychological conditions - meaningfulness, safety and availability - on employees' engagement in their work. Results from the revised theoretical framework revealed that all three psychological conditions exhibited significant positive relations with engagement. Meaningfulness displayed the strongest relation. Job enrichment and work role fit were positively linked to psychological meaningfulness. Rewarding co-worker and supportive supervisor relations were positively associated with psychological safety, whereas adherence to co-worker norms and self-consciousness were negatively associated. Psychological availability was positively related to resources available and negatively related to participation in outside activities. Finally, the relations of job enrichment and work role fit with engagement were both fully mediated by the psychological condition of meaningfulness. The association between adherence to co-worker norms and engagement was partially mediated by psychological safety. Theoretical and practical implications related to psychological engagement at work are discussed.
To explore the challenge to the human soul in organizations is to build a bridge between the world of the personal, subjective, and even unconscious elements of individual experience and the world of organizations that demand rationality, efficiency, and personal sacrifice . . . we must be willing to shift our viewpoint back and forth between what organizations want of people and what constitutes human complexity: the contradictory nature of human needs, desires, and experience. (Briskin, 1998, p. xii.)
This quote from Briskin (1998), an organizational consultant, reflects the challenges that managers and researchers of organizations face as they seek to understand and unleash the human spirit in organizations. The human spirit in this eontext refers to that part of the human being which seeks fulfilment through self-expression at work. We believe that for the human spirit to thrive at work, individuals must be able to completely immerse themselves in their work. That is, they must be able to engage the cognitive, emotional and physical dimensions of themselves in their work. Thus, we began this research project with a passion to understand why some individuals engage their selves in their work, whereas others become alienated and disengage from their work. In our research approach, we drew from traditions in both the functionalist and the humanistic...