Work Engagement: Investigating the Role of Transformational Leadership, Job Resources, and Recovery

ABSTRACT

While the relationship between job resources and engagement has been well established, a greater understanding of the upstream factors that shape job resources is required to develop strategies to promote work engagement. The current study addresses this need by exploring transformational leadership as an upstream job resource, and the moderating role of recovery experiences. It was hypothesized that job resources would mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and engagement. Recovery experiences were expected to moderate the relationship between resources and engagement. A sample of 277 employees from a variety of organizations and industries was obtained. Analysis showed direct relationships between: transformational leadership and engagement, and transformational leadership and job resources. Mediation analysis using bootstrapping found a significant indirect path between transformational leadership and engagement via job resources. Recovery experiences did not significantly moderate the relationship between job resources and engagement. To date, the majority of published literature on recovery has focused on job demands; hence the nonsignificant result offers insight of a potentially more complex relationship for recovery with resources and engagement. Overall, the current study extends the JD-R model and provides evidence for broadening the model to include upstream organizational variables such as transformational leadership.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• job resources
• recovery
• transformational leadership

Funding

This research was supported by the Behavioural Basis of Health at Griffith University.

Author Notes

Amy J. Hawkes is a lecturer in the School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate organizational psychology. Her research interests include transformational leadership, leadership aspirations, recovery, well-being, and empowerment.

Amanda Biggs is a lecturer in the Griffith Business School, Griffith University Australia. Her research investigates the management of psychological and physical health at work, including work engagement, stress, bullying, healthy behaviours, and positive organizational cultures.

Erin Hegerty completed a Bachelor of Psychology, with Honors, through Griffith University. Erin's particular interest areas are non-work recovery and applying recovery principles to maximise engagement and to effectively manage stress at work. Erin is currently working as an organizational development consultant.

Notes

¹ Please contact the authors for supporting materials, including detail of subscale inter-correlations across all measures.