New publication on mental energy
Looking back at the end of my academic career, it looks like mental energy is still a hot topic in today’s research and practice in occupational health psychology, as it was a couple of decades ago. This applies particularly to burnout (low mental energy), but also to work engagement (high mental energy), which was introduced […]
New publication on need satisfaction, work engagement and workaholism
Drawing on Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory, this study examines longitudinally how need satisfaction at work affects four forms of intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation and two types of heavy work investment (workaholism and work engagement). Using two wave data from 314 Dutch employees, structural equation modeling supported our expectations that high need satisfaction was […]
New publication on engaging leadership training
This present quasi-experimental study tested the business impact of a leadership development program focusing on psychological well-being through the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Based on the concept of engaging leadership and on Self-Determination Theory, the 8-month program targeted midlevel team leaders of a multinational organization. The program was designed in co-creation between senior leadership […]
New publication about engaging leadership and performance
The current study investigates how supervisors’ engaging leadership (i.e. inspiring, connecting, strengthening, and empowering), as perceived by their employees, increases employees’ job outcomes at the individual and team level, as mediated by (team) work engagement. Job outcome indicators at the team level are team performance, team learning, and team innovation; and at the individual level, […]
New article on engaging leadership
The current study investigates the mediating role of basic psychological need for satisfaction at work (i.e., autonomy, relatedness, and competence) in the relationship between engaging leadership (i.e., inspiring, strengthening, empowering, and connecting) and work engagement. Also, we are proposing and testing an additional need for meaningfulness that plays a similar mediating role. Data were collected […]
New publication about engagement and burnout in Europe
The aim of this study was to investigate the relative importance of four job demands and five job resources for employee vitality, i.e., work engagement and exhaustion, in three different employment groups: permanent, temporary and temporary agency workers. We employed data from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) collected in 2015 comprising 28,042 employees […]
New publication on engaging leadership
The goal of this study is to provide a cross-lagged examination of the relationships between engaging leadership, job resources and employee work engagement. We propose a mediation model and we postulate that engaging leadership can increase perceptions of three specific job resources (i.e. autonomy, support from colleagues and opportunities for learning and development) which theoretically […]
New publication on the 3-item Work Engagement Scale
The current study introduces an ultra-short, 3-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Using five national samples from Finland (N = 22,117), Japan (N = 1,968), the Netherlands (N = 38,278), Belgium (N = 5,062), and Spain (N = 10,040) its internal consistency and factorial validity vis-à-vis validated measures of burnout, workaholism, and job […]
New publication about work engagement in Europe
This paper investigates differences in the levels of work engagement across demographic and work- and organization-related factors, and their relative importance for work engagement. The study used a sample of 17,498 male and 17,897 female employees from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (2015). Several significant differences were observed between the levels of work engagement […]
New publication on authenticity
Authenticity at work refers to the extent to which a worker feels in touch with their true self while at work. At first sight this concept seems to overlap with the concept of person-environment (P-E) fit, that is, the degree to which an individual experiences good fit with their work environment. Drawing on a sample […]