Work engagement as a mediator between employee attitudes and outcomes

Abstract

This paper assesses the role of work engagement in the relationships between affective commitment, job satisfaction and two employee outcomes – supervisor-rated job performance and self-reported intention to quit – using a cross-lagged research design. Our evidence supports the discriminant validity of work engagement, job satisfaction and affective commitment, and explores the temporal relationships between these constructs. Our findings suggest that work engagement mediates the relationships from affective commitment to job performance and intention to quit. Work engagement also mediates the relationship from job satisfaction to job performance, and partially mediates the relationship from job satisfaction to intention to quit.

Keywords::

• affective commitment
• job performance
• job satisfaction
• mediation
• work engagement

Notes

^1. The three prizes were for £250, £100 and £50.

^2. Non-independence was taken into account by using the TYPE = COMPLEX analysis command in MPlus. This estimates parameters by maximizing a weighted log likelihood function and it uses a sandwich estimator to compute the corresponding standard errors.