<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Employee engagement is an important construct in management research as engaged employees not only perform better in their jobs but also feel happier and more fulfilled in the workplace. Employee engagement is a function of the job resources employees have in coping with their job demands. This paper makes a threefold contribution to the existing engagement literature by: (1) exploring this construct with a sample of third-level academics in the Irish public sector – a relatively unmapped sample in engagement research, (2) identifying organisational support as a key job resource that enables academics to cope with their job demands and (3) proposing that employee engagement reflects how strongly an employee puts his or her heart into work – suggesting a reconceptualization of engagement as love. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.</p></abstract>

Employee engagement is an important construct in management research as engaged employees not only perform better in their jobs but also feel happier and more fulfilled in the workplace. Employee engagement is a function of the job resources employees have in coping with their job demands. This paper makes a threefold contribution to the existing engagement literature by: (1) exploring this construct with a sample of third-level academics in the Irish public sector – a relatively unmapped sample in engagement research, (2) identifying organisational support as a key job resource that enables academics to cope with their job demands and (3) proposing that employee engagement reflects how strongly an employee puts his or her heart into work – suggesting a reconceptualization of engagement as love. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

What’s love got to do with it? Employee engagement amongst higher education workers

The Irish Journal of Management

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Employee engagement is an important construct in management research as engaged employees not only perform better in their jobs but also feel happier and more...

No.	Variable	Mean	SD	1	2	3
1	Work engagement	4.07	0.991	(0.88)
2	Organisational engagement	3.01	0.958	0.569 Correlations are significant at 0.01 level	(0.90)
3	POS	2.21	1.362	0.441 Correlations are significant at 0.01 level	0.670 Correlations are significant at 0.01 level	(0.83)
4	Employee voice	2.32	0.913	0.131	0.459 Correlations are significant at 0.01 level	(0.85)

Job resources	Work engagement	Organisational engagement
POS	0.60 p < 0.01.	0.65 p < 0.01.
Employee voice	-0.018	0.059
R²	0.26	0.47
Adjusted R²	0.24	0.46
F	13.569 p < 0.01.	33.332 p < 0.01.

Scoring categories Strongly disagree	% 12.3%
Disagree	25.9%
Neither agree nor disagree	45.7%
Agree	12.3%
Strongly agree	2.5

What’s love got to do with it? Employee engagement amongst higher education workers

Article Category: Research Article

Published Online: Dec 29, 2017

Page range: 189 - 205

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ijm-2017-0019

Keywords
employee engagement, public sector, job demands-resources model, organisational support, higher education

© 2017 Orla Byrne and Joe MacDonagh

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations and reliabilities

Multiple regression analyses predicting work and organisational engagement

Organisational engagement scores in percentages

What’s love got to do with it? Employee engagement amongst higher education workers

Article Category: Research Article

Published Online: Dec 29, 2017

Page range: 189 - 205

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ijm-2017-0019

Keywordsemployee engagement, public sector, job demands-resources model, organisational support, higher education

© 2017 Orla Byrne and Joe MacDonagh

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations and reliabilities

Multiple regression analyses predicting work and organisational engagement

Organisational engagement scores in percentages

Keywords
employee engagement, public sector, job demands-resources model, organisational support, higher education