Employee engagement antecedents and outcomes: perceptions of what engagement looks like for remote workers

Employee engagement antecedents and outcomes: perceptions of what engagement looks like for remote workers

This thesis explores the relationships between job resources and leader-member exchange as antecedents, and job satisfaction and organisation commitment as outcomes of engagement in respect of remote techno workers. The multidimensional approach including job and organisation engagement is considered a moderating variable in circumstances when an organisations proximity and context was altered and broadened, and employee engagement is the overall theoretical framework underpinning this research. The thesis provides a contextual analysis of the data using an inductive case study approach. The thesis found that both social and leadership antecedents were important to building employee engagement in techno workers. More specifically leader-member exchange and engaging leadership influenced the engagement of techno workers and the social and interpersonal organisational artefacts of social capital and social support create a sense of belonging that has a community buffering effect on isolated workers. Similarly, and consistent with the inductive approach, the thesis found that multidimensional employee engagement significantly influenced individual work-related attitudes such as achievement and job satisfaction as well as individual performance such as productivity and going above and beyond. To this extent, the thesis makes a substantial contribution to existing theory by exploring which employee engagement antecedents and outcomes are more germane in respect of remote techno workers. The study extends existing theory about employee engagement in relatively stable and traditional work environments by explicating a stronger link between antecedents and outcomes in remote and distal work environments. This contextual analysis is particularly important and timely in a post Covid-19 world where an increasing amount of work shifts from traditional working environments into the home.