What Is Work Engagement?

Organizations and workplaces have the potential to influence employees’ health and well-being, which accounts for the numerous definitions, theories, and measures about health and well-being. Some inconsistences also exist among the terms that researchers use to refer to psychological and/or physical health/well-being, such as “psychological well-being”, “subjective well-being”, “mental health”, and “physical health”, among others. Moreover “health” and “well-being” are considered as equivalents, but at times health has a more physical component and well-being a more psychological one.

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1946). Moreover, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines health as “a physical, psychological, mental, and social state of tolerance and compensation outside the limits of which any situation is perceived by the individual …as the manifestation of a morbid state …[so] as far as the individual is concerned, his opinion is the only one that counts” (cited in Emmet, Reference Emmet, Green and Baker1991, p. 40). The OECD developed the Better Life project that includes objective well-being variables and also subjective well-being defined as “good mental states, including all the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives, and the affective reaction of people to their experiences” (OECD, 2013, p. 29).

Thus, it is important to differentiate different facets of health/well-being, such as: physical health/well-being of workers (e.g., physical symptoms and physical illnesses and diseases); psychological health/well-being (mental/emotional), addressing topics such as positive/negative emotional states, satisfaction, strain, burnout, engagement, thriving, and so on; and social/societal facets, such as connectedness, giving/receiving help, and prosocial motivation. These three levels refer to health/well-being related to the presence of positive states (e.g., satisfaction) and the absence of negative states (e.g., anxiety). However, whereas the WHO or OECD health definitions address general well-being, our concern is with workplace well-being, which Grant et al. (Reference Grant, Christianson and Price2007, p. 52), drawing on the work by Warr (Reference Warr1987), define as “the overall quality of an employee’s experience and functioning at work”. In 1999, Danna and Griffin proposed several definitions of health and well-being in the workplace, indicating that “health” “generally appears to encompass both physiological and psychological symptomology within a more medical context (e.g., reported symptomology or a diagnosis of illness or disease)” (p. 364). Furthermore, “well-being” is rooted in the concept of “affective well-being” by Warr (Reference Warr1987, Reference Warr1990), which is broader and views the person as a whole that includes context-free measures such as life satisfaction and home–work relations.

Building on the literature, although in previous research health is usually linked to physical symptoms, I agree more with the WHO definition of “health” as a state of complete physical, mental, and social “well-being”, which is conceptually similar. Moreover, health and well-being “are not the mere absence of illness”, which coincides with the positive psychology perspective, according to which well-being and happiness are not simply the absence of negative functions but rather something more. In other words, a lack of job burnout among employees of a company is not the same thing as the presence of work engagement among them. Therefore, well-being is a complex psychosocial construct that is not only the absence of negative psychological constructs but also includes different life domains and comprises multiples physical, psychological, and social dimensions as well (e.g., Forgeard et al., Reference Forgeard, Jayawickreme, Kern and Seligman2011; Friedman & Kern, Reference Friedman and Kern2014; Huppert & So, Reference Huppert and So2013; Ryff & Keyes, Reference Ryff and Keyes1995).

In the specific arena of work and organizations, we could extrapolate that there are three main facets of work-related well-being concerned with physical, psychological, and social functioning in the workplace and in organizations. I will adapt this approach by referring to organizational well-being as a multilevel construct that includes individual, group, leader, and organizational (IGLO) levels (Nielsen et al., Reference Nielsen, Yarker, Munir and Bültmann2018) of different facets (i.e., physical, psychological-mental/emotional, and social) of well-being in a reciprocal, nutritive, and sustainable relationship over time (Salanova, Reference Salanova2020a). I suggest that there is no unique model of organizational well-being, but that there are rather different ones that consider “well-being” in organizations with multiple facets that can be measured and enhanced over time.

With this broad background in mind, I consider work engagement (WE) as an indicator of psychological well-being. In this regard, although past research has shown different approaches to work engagement, such as need satisfaction (Kahn, Reference Kahn1990), satisfaction-engagement (Harter et al., Reference Harter, Schmidt and Hayes2002), multidimensional (Saks, Reference Saks2006), and burnout-engagement (Maslach & Leiter, Reference Maslach and Leiter1997; Schaufeli et al., Reference Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá and Bakker2002; see Shuck, Reference Shuck, Alagaraja, Rose, Owen, Osam and Bergman2017 for a review), in this chapter, work engagement will be considered within the burnout-engagement approach, due to its predominance in the research on work engagement (see Schaufeli & Bakker, Reference Schaufeli, Bakker, Tuch, Bakker, Tay and Gander2022, for a review). The work engagement concept is rooted in occupational health psychology (OHP) and positive organizational psychology (POP) as a distinct concept but is negatively related to burnout, and in turn it is defined in its own right as a fully motivational (affective-cognitive) experience, a kind of psychological well-being at work. For example, one of the most widespread definitions of WE (Schaufeli et al., Reference Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá and Bakker2002) views it as a “positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (p. 74). Moreover, Bakker et al. (Reference Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter and Taris2008) define work engagement as “a positive, fulfilling affective-motivational state of work-related well-being that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (p. 187).

Rather than a momentary and specific state, work engagement refers to a more persistent and psychological state that is not focused on any particular object, event, individual, or behavior. Vigor is characterized by high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistence even in the face of difficulties. Dedication is characterized by a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge. Dedication has a wider scope because it not only refers to a particular cognitive or belief state but also includes the affective dimension as well. The final dimension of engagement, absorption, is characterized by being fully concentrated and deeply engrossed in one’s work, where time passes quickly and one finds it difficult to detach from work. Sometimes engagement has been considered as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, Reference Csikszentmihalyi1990), but while both are related, they are not the same. Specifically, the subdimension of absorption is very close to flow experiences because both are related to focused attention, clear mind, unison of mind and body, effortless concentration, complete control, loss of self-consciousness, distortion of time, and intrinsic enjoyment. However, flow is temporary and related to the specific task or activity that you are doing, and engagement is a more pervasive and persistent positive state of mind.

Based on previous research, in Salanova (Reference Salanova, Meyer and Schneider2021), I define work engagement as a key indicator of employee health/well-being, specifically organizational well-being at all IGLO levels, as well as a core dimension of a healthy organization, as in the healthy and resilient organization (HERO) model (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Llorens, Cifre and Martínez2012, Reference Salanova, Llorens and Martínez2019). Thus, employees with high levels of work engagement (i.e., vigor, dedication, and absorption) are characterized by a positive pattern of psychological well-being at work, and team engagement or collective engagement exists at different levels in organizations (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Llorens, Cifre, Martínez and Schaufeli2003) and is an indicator of a healthy organization.

Furthermore, employee engagement is a complex well-being psychological construct that coexists in organizations with other constructs such as employee burnout. In other places (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Del Libano, Llorens and Schaufeli2014), we provided evidence of a parsimonious, theory-based classification of profiles of employee well-being: burnout, work engagement, and other less well-known profiles such as workaholism and 9-to-5 employees (see Figure 9.1). We contributed to the discussion (Avey et al., Reference Avey, Luthans, Smith and Palmer2010) about the conceptualization and measurement of employee well-being by suggesting a new combination of motivational, affective, and cognitive dimensions with which to interpret differences in patterns of employee well-being. Specifically, we showed that engaged workers have high levels of energy while working, take pleasure in and are challenged by jobs where they can use their skills and energy, and feel good at work. They also identify with their work and their organization. In sum, the concept of engaged employees consists of a pattern of psychological well-being characterized by high levels of positive drive and energy, pleasure, work identification, and feeling challenged to have good job skills. Moreover, despite being heavy work investors, this “investment” is positive, due to their subjective perceptions of high levels of well-being and favorable job characteristics (medium job demands and high job resources), according to the predictions of the JD-R Model (Bakker & Demerouti, Reference Bakker and Demerouti2017; Schaufeli & Bakker, Reference Schaufeli, Bakker, Tuch, Bakker, Tay and Gander2022), which will be described in the next section.

Figure 9.1 The four profiles of employee well-being

How and Why Do Employees Experience Work Engagement?

Mainly, research has focused on the way workplaces influence employees’ stress and strain and how organizational/job characteristics are potential stressors with a negative impact on employee life and societies (see Chapters 1–3 of this book). However, organizations can also influence employees in a positive way by reducing job stress and illness and enhancing work-related psychological well-being, as in work engagement, allowing employees to experience these positive feelings in healthy organizations (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Llorens, Cifre and Martínez2012) and psychologically healthy workplaces (Day & Nielsen, Reference Day, Nielsen, Chmiel, Fraccaroni and Sverke2017; Kelloway & Day, Reference Kelloway and Day2005). We defined HERO as

In a similar way, the idea of a psychologically healthy workplace (PHW) refers to a workplace that aims to foster employee health by reducing negative stressors and demands and promoting organizational resources to enhance well-being (Kelloway & Day, Reference Kelloway and Day2005). Day and Randell (Reference Day, Randell, Day, Kelloway and Hurrell2014) defined PHW as workplaces that “are dedicated to promoting and supporting the physical and psychological health and well-being of their employees while simultaneously incorporating solid business practices to remain an efficient and productive business entity and having a positive impact on their clients and community” (p. 10).

These nutritive workplace environments provide employees with job resources, not only material ones, such as salaries, time structure, etc., but also the satisfaction of basic psychological needs so that employees feel more engaged and motivated in the workplace. According to self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, Reference Deci and Ryan2000), humans are basically motivated and experience psychological well-being (such as work engagement) when three basic psychological needs are satisfied, i.e., the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In the workplace, for example, employees can experience autonomy by making decisions about their tasks, competence by using signature strengths in different work areas, and relatedness by cultivating social relationships and having leaders’ social support, in addition to contributing to coworkers’ personal grow and development. In these inspiring work atmospheres, work is meaningful and engaging and leads employees to thrive and flourish as human beings.

The job demands-resources (JD-R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, Reference Bakker and Demerouti2017; Schaufeli & Bakker, Reference Schaufeli, Bakker, Tuch, Bakker, Tay and Gander2022) is a good theoretical framework to explain how job resources together with job demands influence work engagement and reduce job burnout (see Chapter 8 in this book for a more detailed overview of burnout). According to the JD-R model, job resources contribute to an intrinsic motivational process because they help employees to obtain personal and professional growth, learning, and development. They also play a role in extrinsic motivational because they are instrumental for achieving different goals at work. In addition, the JD-R model postulates that job resources are even more relevant when job demands are higher, such as work overload, role conflicts, and emotional demands (Bakker et al., Reference Bakker and Demerouti2007).

Different meta-analyses on work engagement have shown its uniqueness and relationships with job demands and (job and personal) resources. Halbesleben (Reference Halbesleben, Bakker and Leiter2010) carried out a meta-analysis that included 74 unique samples and 45,683 participants, in order to assess the associations between work engagement and job demands and resources. As expected, job resources (i.e., social support, job control, feedback, and climate) were positively related to work engagement (ρ = .35), whereas job demands (i.e., work overload and work–family conflict) were weakly and negatively associated with it (ρ = −.09). However, although resources are usually strongly related to work engagement, this is not always true for job demands. For example, in a recent study, Lesener et al. (Reference Lesener, Gusy, Jochmann and Wolter2019) carried out a meta-analysis that included 77 longitudinal samples, and they showed that job demands were not related to work engagement over time, whereas job resources were reciprocally related to work engagement. Thus, it seems that resources and work engagement could have a kind of reciprocal effect on each other over time, and so the idea of positive gain cycles emerged in past research. Resources have motivational power as drivers of work engagement, which, in turn, leads to the accumulation of more resources, and so on (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Schaufeli, Xanthopoulou, Bakker, Bakker and Leiter2010). Recently, DeCuypere and Schaufeli (Reference Decuypere and Schaufeli2020) also showed in their meta-analysis (k = 69, N = 32,924) that work engagement was positively correlated with a very important job social resource, that is, positive leadership styles, including transformational (ρ = .45), servant (ρ = .40), and authentic (ρ = .35) leadership.

Personal resources are mutually related to job resources and appear to influence work engagement and, in turn, job performance. Recent research showed that relatively permanent personal resources (e.g., personality traits such as extraversion, positive affectivity, conscientiousness; see meta-analysis by Young et al., Reference Young, Glerum, Wang and Joseph2018) and more state-like and temporary personal resources (i.e., resilience, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, psychological capital; see systematic review by Bailey et al., Reference Bailey, Madden, Alfes and Fletcher2017; Carmona et al., 2020; Peláez et al., Reference Peláez, Coo and Salanova2020) are strongly related to work engagement. Research suggests that these personal and job resources have effects on WE, which in turn influences job attitudes and behaviors, business outcomes, and health and well-being (see Figure 9.2), as described recently by Schaufeli and Bakker (Reference Schaufeli, Bakker, Tuch, Bakker, Tay and Gander2022). Figure 9.2 also reflects research suggesting that WE can influence job resources (see above) and be influenced by employees’ health and well-being, job attitudes, and work behaviors (explained in greater detail below). The arrows therefore depict reciprocal relationships between WE and those other constructs.

Figure 9.2 Integrative model of work engagement

In sum, work engagement occurs in the context of (healthy) organizations at different IGLO levels as a positive well-being psychological experience, due to the influence of personal and job resources and job demands. In turn, work engagement has a positive effect on positive attitudes, behaviors, and “other facets of health and well-being”, as described in the following sections. As mentioned above, health and well-being “are not the mere absence of illness”; they do not simply involve an absence of negative symptoms but rather something more. A lack of burnout or depression symptoms is not the same thing as the presence of engagement, happiness, trust, thriving, and so on, because well-being is a complex psychosocial construct. In this chapter, I consider work engagement to be an indicator of psychological well-being, and according to the JD-R and HERO models, it is also related to other well-being facets, such as physical, psychological, and social well-being.

Work Engagement and Physical Well-Being

Physical well-being catches physiological markers of health and sickness in organizations; it is normally investigated through feelings of health, including positive markers, such as a feeling of energy, and negative ones, such as lack of fatigue, strain, and psychosomatic complains (i.e., headaches, sleep problems, musculoskeletal disorders). According to predictions of the JD-R model, employees working in environments where they experience higher levels of WE draw on positive psychological spiral gains that positively influence their health (Xanthopoulou et al., Reference Xanthopoulou, Bakker, Demerouti and Schaufeli2009). For example, in a sample of older employees, a study with a one-year longitudinal design showed that physical load, higher psychological job demands, and lower autonomy at baseline were associated with poorer physical health at follow-up, but higher WE at baseline was related to better physical and, especially, mental health over time, showing this kind of positive spiral (Leijten et al., Reference Leijten, van den Heuvel and van der Beek2015). Moreover, in a recent meta-analytic structural equation model (MASEM), Goering et al. (Reference Goering, Shimazu, Zhou, Wada and Sakai2017) found that there was a positive relationship between WE and physical health (ß = 0.08), albeit weaker in magnitude. Regarding medical indicators of physical health, prospective cohort studies showed that engaged employees had low levels of C-reactive protein, which is an established risk factor for cardiovascular disease (Eguchi et al., 2016). Work engagement is also associated with healthy cardiac autonomic activity (Seppälä et al., Reference Seppälä, Mauno, Kinnunen, Feldt, Juuti, Tolvanen and Rusko2012). These last two studies seem to suggest that WE fosters cardiovascular health as well.

Work engagement has been researched in terms of its relationship with sleep quality and as an indirect measure of physical health. The idea is that good sleep quality is an indicator of physical health and improves levels of WE among employees because it is a vital resource that fills people with positive energy. Thus, in a sample of 328 workers, Barber et al. (Reference Barber, Grawitch and Munz2013) observed that people who are frequently engaged in poor sleeping behaviors had lower self‐regulatory competence, suffered depletion of energy, and showed less work engagement. A daily diary study with 107 employees (Kühnel et al., Reference Kühnel, Zacher, Bloom and Bledow2017) provided data showing that sleep quality was beneficial for employees’ daily work engagement. After nights when employees slept better, they indicated higher WE during the next day. In a similar vein and considering that recovery could be a kind of marker of sleep quality, Sonnentag et al. (Reference Sonnentag, Mojza, Demerouti and Bakker2012) found that when individuals were more sleep recovered in the morning, they experienced more engagement at the workplace. Moreover, using a diary study (N = 63), Diestel et al. (Reference Diestel, Rivkin and Schmidt2015) tested the moderating effect of sleep quality between emotional dissonance and daily work engagement, showing that the negative relationship between them was mitigated by increasing daily sleep quality. However, the work engagement–sleep quality relationship seems to be complex. Sheng et al. (Reference Sheng, Wang, Hong, Zhu and Zhang2019) showed that chronic sleep quality moderated the relationship between daily time pressure (as a type of challenge demand) and daily engagement. Thus, when the sleep quality at person-level is high, then a curvilinear relationship exists between time pressure experienced and WE that increases moderately day by day.

Finally, it is interesting to report research results about the way WE is related to physical energy while working, and that WE could have a limit in terms of workers’ depletion of energy or exhaustion over work days and weeks, with potential negative long-term effects. WE involves resource investment each day at work, and it is accumulative over time. Therefore, WE physiologically depletes resources, causing employees to feel exhausted. In this regard, research has shown, on the one hand, that WE may increase feelings of exhaustion over time (Byrne et al., Reference Byrne, Peters and Weston2016, Hakanen et al., Reference Hakanen, Peeters and Schaufeli2018, Schaufeli et al., Reference Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá and Bakker2002), but this engagement–exhaustion relationship is even more complex. For example, from a temporal perspective, Junker et al. (Reference Junker, Kaluza, Häusser, Mojzisch, van Dick, Knoll and Demerouti2020) investigated how exhaustion develops over time as a function of WE. In two samples, they showed that WE may be positive in the short term (in the beginning, high levels of engagement are associated with less exhaustion), but more harmful in the long term by increasing exhaustion over time.

Mäkikangas et al. (Reference Mäkikangas, Hyvönen and Feldt2016) showed that the association between changes in WE and changes in exhaustion is not identical in every individual; instead, subgroups exist (i.e., moderating variables) where increases in WE are unrelated to decreases in exhaustion, for example. Thus, one study (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Richard, Boncoeur and Ford2020) showed that WE predicts exhaustion when individuals score lower on the conscientiousness and emotional stability personality traits. They found a three-way interaction where WE increased emotional exhaustion in less conscientious individuals who were also neurotic or emotionally unstable, whereas it decreased emotional exhaustion in more conscientious individuals who were emotionally stable. Finally, WE also mediated the effect of the toxic relationship between emotional exhaustion and negative affect on productivity loss in employees due to their presenteeism. In a sample of 42 employees (Ferreira et al., Reference Ferreira, da Costa Ferreira, Cooper and Oliveira2019) who completed a ten-day diary survey (420 diary tasks), multilevel linear modeling showed this mediating effect of WE, pointing to the relevance of promoting WE to reduce the effects of negative affect and emotional exhaustion on productivity.

Depletion of physical energy and feelings of exhaustion in highly engaged employees can be explained physiologically. In a recent study, Baethge et al. (Reference Baethge, Junker and Rigotti2020) showed that WE was related to high sympathetic arousal (heart rate variation, HRV) in a sample of 118 public office employees on five working days, and multilevel analyses showed that elevated WE during one work week was associated with higher sympathetic activation, which is a health risk. Thus, a positive subjective construct (i.e., work engagement) does not always match objective indicators of well-being, as other research has also shown (Feldman et al., Reference Feldman, Cohen, Lepore, Matthews, Kamarck and Marsland1999; Jackowska et al., Reference Jackowska, Dockray, Hendrickx and Steptoe2011). Schwerdtfeger and Gerteis (Reference Schwerdtfeger and Gerteis2014) found that daily activated engagement was related to less momentary HRV and, therefore, stronger sympathetic activation. Their absorption on that day may further reduce their perception of early signs of fatigue (Sonnentag et al., Reference Sonnentag, Binnewies and Mojza2010) and then negatively affect their levels of well-being in the long run. Because prolonged sympathetic activation has been associated with severe physiological consequences, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases (Grassi et al., Reference Grassi, Dell’Oro and Quarti-Trevano2005), it could be an indicator of a “negative side” of work engagement, at least in terms of the long-term physiological costs of a highly engaged work workforce.

Work Engagement and Psychological Well-Being

Psychological (mental and emotional) well-being comprises both the absence of negative mind states and the presence of positive ones. Past research has shown that WE is related to an absence of anxiety, depression (Shuck et al., Reference Shuck, Alagaraja, Rose, Owen, Osam and Bergman2017), and burnout (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2022). For example, Innstrand et al. (Reference Innstrand, Langballe and Falkum2012), in a two-year longitudinal study, examined the dynamic relationships between WE (i.e., vigor and dedication) and symptoms of anxiety and depression in a sample of 3,475 respondents from different occupational groups in Norway. The results showed that WE is more likely to be the antecedent of low symptoms of depression and anxiety than the other way around. In particular, the vigor dimension of WE predicts lower levels of depression and anxiety two years later. Moreover, WE not only predicts future self-reported outcomes such as low levels of depressive symptoms (Hakanen & Schaufeli, Reference Hakanen and Schaufeli2012) and low levels of psychological distress (Hakanen et al., Reference Hakanen, Peeters and Schaufeli2018) but is also an important predictor of the nonoccurrence of a major depression diagnosis (Imamura et al., Reference Imamura, Kawakami, Inoue, Shimazu, Tsutsumi and Takahashi2016). In the recent systematic review about how WE, along with work vigor, is related to physical and psychological health, Cortés-Denia et al. (Reference Cortés-Denia, Lopez-Zafra and Pulido-Martos2021) found, in the final 70 papers reviewed, that WE is mostly related to a lower risk of suffering from stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and psychological tension.

Regarding the relationship between engagement and burnout, research is intense and very productive (see Chapter 8 in this book), although there is still an ongoing debate about the relationships between the two, i.e., whether they are identical and opposite constructs (Maslash & Leiter, Reference Maslach and Leiter1997) or whether WE does not add anything beyond burnout. Abundant research and meta-analyses on WE (shown in this chapter) show that engagement is a psychological construct that adds something to the research. Even the burnout and engagement dimensions are placed on two distinct and bipolar dimensions (i.e., energy with vigor and exhaustion; and identification with dedication and cynicism) (González-Romá et al., Reference González-Romá, Schaufeli, Bakker and Lloret2006; Schaufeli & Salanova, Reference Schaufeli and Salanova2007). In that sense, an absence of one (e.g., low engagement) does not necessarily imply that the other is high (e.g., high burnout).

The bipolar dimension of energy seems to be more prominent, and, in any case, both terms refer to energy, with energy depletion (burnout) and increased energy (engagement) being related to each other. In a recent MASEM, Goering et al. (Reference Goering, Shimazu, Zhou, Wada and Sakai2017) concluded that burnout and engagement manifested different relationships with drivers and antecedents proposed by the JD-R model. For example, challenge demands are related to both engagement and burnout. However, hindrance demands have a stronger relationship with burnout, whereas job resources relate more strongly to WE. Burnout and engagement have different attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral consequences as well.

From a temporal perspective, longitudinal analyses of burnout and engagement could answer some questions about the way these two constructs develop over time, i.e., how engagement influences burnout and vice versa. Because well-being levels can fluctuate over time (Mäkikangas et al., Reference Mäkikangas, Hyvönen and Feldt2016), employees can move from feeling engaged to feeling burnout, and vice versa. Depending on specific organizational characteristics, WE can be an antecedent of burnout (e.g., due to impaired social exchange processes; Schaufeli & Salanova, Reference Schaufeli and Salanova2011), but it is also possible that initial levels of burnout can develop into more engagement over time if personal and job resources also change. For example, in the study by Mäkikangas et al. (Reference Mäkikangas, Hyvönen and Feldt2016), the authors concluded that well-being tends to vary over time, especially in younger employees. Considering changing job environments, they argue that an increase in resources is related to a boost in well-being, and that the opposite is also true.

But what influences what? Research on the way burnout is related to engagement over time (Hakanen & Schaufeli, Reference Hakanen and Schaufeli2012) showed that burnout at Time 1 is negatively related to engagement at Time 2 (after three years) and Time 3 (four years after Time 2). Experiencing burnout seems to deplete resources and hamper engagement over time. In a sample of 274 secondary-school teachers, Llorens and Salanova (Reference Llorens and Salanova2014) found, in a two-wave longitudinal study, that exhaustion and cynicism negatively predicted vigor and dedication over time (eight months later). We considered that these findings tested the conservation of resources theory (Hobföll, Reference Hobföll1989), in the sense that when people lost some valued resources, they try to minimize the possibility of losing even more. However, this relationship between burnout and engagement over time seems to be moderated by the time lag. For example, in the systematic review by Maricuțoiu et al. (Reference Maricuțoiu, Sulea and Iancu2017) with 25 longitudinal studies (N = 13.271 participants), they did not find a significant temporal order between burnout and engagement, taking into account all the time intervals. However, when considering a specific timeframe, i.e., a 12-month time lag, the results showed a reciprocal, negative relationship between exhaustion (the energy dimension of burnout) and work engagement. The other interesting result is that the effect of burnout on engagement seems to be stronger than the effect of engagement on burnout.

Based on previous research on the relationship between engagement and burnout over time, this relationship is complex and depends, among other things, on the time lag. Moreover, it could also depend on the level of analysis used to examine engagement and burnout. For example, an interesting theoretical approach is defended by Sabine Sonnentag’s studies showing that engagement and burnout differ at a deeper psychological level because they are related to each other at different levels of analysis (i.e., WE occurs at the task level and burnout at the job level). Work engagement fluctuates from task to task during a workday, whereas burnout is a chronic state that is more lasting over time, more pervasive, and affected more by job characteristics than by specific tasks.

However, psychological well-being is not only the absence of negative mental constructs such as anxiety, depression, or burnout. From a positive psychological approach, well-being includes not only the mere absence of illness but also the presence of positive states of mind such as positive emotions or work engagement, among others. Ryan and Deci (Reference Ryan, Deci, Deci and Ryan2002), for example, noted that (1) two types of psychological well-being can be differentiated: hedonic and eudaimonic well-being; and (2) although the relations between the two are still unclear and more research is needed (Heintzelman, Reference Heintzelman, Diener, Oishi and Tay2018), it is interesting to clarify how work engagement is related to each of them.

Work Engagement and Social Well-Being

In a more general view of well-being, Keyes (Reference Keyes2007) noted that social well-being refers to a psychosocial experience where individuals are socially accepting, believe in the others’ potential, feel that the society is meaningful and their own activities are meaningful for others, and experience psychological relatedness with other people. In this regard, engagement is associated with social well-being because it contributes to a meaningful life, making the person feel part of society (Keyes, Reference Keyes2007). Moreover, social well-being could be experienced in the workplace because it is associated with strong feelings of social connection with others, such as coworkers, leaders, customers, etc. For example, giving and receiving help to people in the workplace could guard against job demands (Teng et al., Reference Teng, Zhang and Qiu2018; Uy et al., Reference Uy, Lin and Ilies2017), and prosocial motivations, such as the desire to exert effort to benefit others or social collectives, are potential indicators of social well-being that could be related to a strong sense of energy at work and being dedicated to and absorbed in tasks, that is, work engagement. For example, in a study about the relationship between job insecurity and work engagement and performance, Shin and Hur (Reference Shin and Hur2020) found that the negative relationship between job insecurity and work engagement was weakest when employees’ help-giving and prosocial motivations were both high. Thus, giving/receiving help and prosocial behavior are potential psychosocial mechanisms of social well-being that alleviate work engagement when employees suffer from job insecurity.

Furthermore, when interactions and relationships with others, such as coworkers, leaders, and customers, shape how people think, feel, and behave, they can potentially affect meaningfulness if they provide the opportunity to reinforce valued identities at work (Kahn, Reference Kahn, Dutton and Ragins2007). These relational sources of meaning could be, for example, voices that are heard, important work social connections, or even competent and inspirational supervision by leaders. When these social sources of meaning are present in the workplace, they can cause employees to think about relevant questions, such as whether it is worthwhile for them to be fully engaged at this moment in their work/task/teamwork (Kahn & Fellows, Reference Kahn, Fellows, Dik, Byrne and Steger2013). In this context, the construct of team/collective work engagement and its relationship with indicators of social well-being makes sense. Work engagement can also be shared by team members as an index of (collective) team engagement (Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Llorens, Cifre, Martínez and Schaufeli2003; Schaufeli & Salanova, Reference Schaufeli and Salanova2011; Torrente et al., Reference Torrente, Salanova, Llorens and Schaufeli2012). This sharedness of engagement can occur through an emotional contagion process defined as “the tendency to automatically imitate and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, therefore, to converge together” (Hatfield et al., Reference Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson1994). We have shown the existence of team engagement in studies with more than 200 work units and their leaders. This research reveals that team engagement is activated by the presence of social resources shared by the team (i.e., team coordination, teamwork, shared social support), and it results in high in-role and extra-role performance (Cruz et al., Reference Cruz, Salanova and Martínez2013; Gracia et al., Reference Gracia, Salanova, Grau and Cifre2013; Salanova et al., Reference Salanova, Llorens and Schaufeli2011; Torrente et al., Reference Torrente, Salanova, Llorens and Schaufeli2012, Reference Torrente, Salanova and Llorens2013). To date, team/group cohesion could be an indicator of social well-being because it can be understood as the extent to which team members are committed to their team and how well the team is integrated as it pursues its goals (Kozlowski & Ilgen, Reference Kozlowski and Ilgen2006). Members of teams with high cohesion are more motivated to contribute to the team’s collective goal and engage in collective work as a team. For example, in a longitudinal three-wave study with 118 project teams (605 individuals) that performed three creativity tasks, we showed (Rodriguez-Sánchez et al., Reference Rodríguez-Sánchez, Devloo, Rico, Salanova and Anseel2017) that team cohesion leads to collective team engagement, which in turn has a positive effect on team creative performance.

A psychosocial construct that is close to cohesion is organizational connectedness (Huynh, Reference Huynh, Metzer and Winefield2012a), a collective positive state of well-being that people experience when they feel a strong sense of belonging in the workplace or even with customers, clients, and recipients of their service. People with high organizational connectedness manifest human striving for interpersonal attachments through positive feelings of appreciation and respect as part of the relationship with the client, through feelings such as compassion and altruistic behaviors, and in turn they experience satisfaction due to the feelings of appreciation and gratitude received from others (Dein & Abbas, Reference Dein and Abbas2005). Moreover, organizational connectedness could be related to an individual’s sense of connection to the values of an organization where employees feel appreciated, recognized, and treated fairly, as well as connection to their own tasks when they are motivating and inspiring. Studies by Huynh and colleagues (Huynh et al., Reference Huynh, Metzer and Winefield2012a, Reference Huynh, Metzer and Winefield2012b) have shown that organizational connectedness is related to desirable outcomes for people doing voluntary tasks, including work engagement. For example, Huynh et al. (2014), in a sample of 887 volunteers, and based on the JD-R model framework, showed that WE and organizational connectedness were positive mechanisms that explain how job resources are related to turnover. These well-being psychological constructs are also highly intercorrelated (r = .61); however, in this study, no specific relationships between the two were proposed.

Social well-being could also be experienced with people from other life domains outside the workplace, such as family, friends, community, society, etc., thus affecting work engagement and vice versa. For example, engagement in the workplace may provide benefits for individuals’ positive social contacts and interactions, which are valuable social resources that lead to a positive social connection with others at work and successful communal and social functioning. According to the spillover theory (Wilensky, Reference Wilensky1960), attitudes and behaviors experienced in a social domain (i.e., work) could be transferred to other life contexts, showing a kind of effect on one’s skills and psychological experience. For example, engaged employees could express a desire to be useful and contribute to other social contexts related to social life (Vigoda-Gadot et al., Reference Vigoda-Gadot, Mizrahi, Miller-Mor and Tevet2008). This spillover is defined by Greenhaus and Powell (Reference Greenhaus and Powell2006, p. 73) as “the extent to which experiences in one role improve the quality of life in the other role”. In this regard, WE has been related to community social involvement, referred to as activities of individual citizens, such as belonging to community associations and school committees and taking part in cultural activities aimed at influencing the community (Verba & Nie, Reference Verba and Nie1972). Moreover, Eldor et al. (Reference Eldor, Harpaz and Westman2016) found in their multilevel study that WE is also related to employees’ levels of community involvement, creating added value beyond the work area and enriching other social domains of their lives outside the workplace. At the societal level, the European Working Conditions Survey has shown that work engagement at the national level is curvilinearly related to a country’s gross domestic product and linearly related to various indicators of good governance, such as public integrity, quality of democracy, and gender equality as societal indicators of social well-being (Schaufeli, Reference Schaufeli2018).

Finally, it is important to note that social well-being is processed differently by individuals and groups. It also depends on cultural and societal norms and is different, for example, in collectivistic or individualistic cultures. The Chinese term “guanxi” is related to personal connections from the implicit psychological contracts reciprocity exchanged, and also nurture mutual commitment and the desire for relationships in the long term (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Chen and Huang2013) as the general quality of “informal” relationships rather than formal relationships (Wong et al., Reference Wong, Ngo and Wong2003). Guanxi can be built and used to progress through life and work (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Chen and Huang2013; Xin & Pearce, Reference Xin and Pearce1996). However, guanxi in HRM practices is negatively perceived by employees when they observe other colleagues with more guanxi-based preferential treatment and, thus, perceive them as guanxi beneficiaries. Thus, studies have shown the negative effects of employees’ perceptions of guanxi HRM practices on employee outcomes, such as in‐role and extra‐role performance (Hsu & Wang, Reference Hsu and Wang2007), management trust (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Friedman, Yu and Sun2011), and even work engagement. For example, in a three-wave study with 338 employees on how career adaptability affects eudaimonic well-being and work engagement, Yang et al. (Reference Yang, Qian, Liu, Huang, Chau and Wang2018) found that career adaptability has a significant effect on work engagement, which, in turn, predicts EWB, with these effects being stronger when guanxi is low. Moreover, in a double study with (1) a three time‐lagged sample of 45 work groups and 205 employees in a state‐owned organization and another (2) cross‐sectional study of 101 work groups and 413 employees in 101 different organizations, Yang et al. (Reference Yang, Qian, Liu, Huang, Chau and Wang2018) showed that supervisors’ perceptions of guanxi HRM practices were positively related to subordinates’ perceptions of guanxi HRM practices, which, in turn, negatively affected subordinates’ work engagement.

Conclusions

I would like to end the chapter by making some theoretical and practical concluding remarks and describing current insights about what WE is, how and why employees experience it, how WE is related to other indicators of organizational well-being, and some notes for a future research agenda on work engagement and organizational well-being.

Throughout the chapter, work engagement is considered a key element of organizational well-being, a multilevel construct (IGLO) presenting different facets or areas of well-being, such as physical, psychological, and social well-being, which are reciprocally related over time (Salanova, Reference Salanova2020a). Work engagement could be considered a “psychological” indicator of organizational well-being. Of course, there are different definitions of work engagement, as I noted in this chapter. However, from my point of view, an integrative vision of WE is rooted in OHP and POP, as a concept distinct from but negatively related to burnout. Defined in its own right, WE is considered a fully motivational (affective-cognitive) experience, a kind of psychological well-being in the workplace, characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Furthermore, WE is contextualized in a broader picture as a core dimension of a HERO, where the incidence of WE in an organization coexists with other patterns of employee well-being, such as burnout, workaholics, and 9-to-5 employees.

Work-engaged employees usually work in nutritive workplace environments that provide them with enough job resources and healthy organizational practices to not only satisfy their basic physical and psychological needs but also provide them with future positive and inspirational scenarios so that they can prosper and flourish. This chapter showed empirical evidence about the way employees experience work engagement in these HERO environments, where job resources may play either an intrinsic motivational role because they foster employees’ growth, learning, and development, or an extrinsic motivational role because they are instrumental in achieving work goals. Moreover, resources and work engagement seem to work together and have a reciprocal interinfluence on each other over time, forming positive gain cycles and spirals. Resources have motivational power as drivers of work engagement, which, in turn, leads to the accumulation of more resources, and so on. Employees feel motivated when resources are available in the workplace, and different meta-analyses have shown that job demands and job and personal resources are linked to work engagement, which in turn has consequences for employees’ work attitudes (i.e., organizational commitment), behaviors (i.e., job performance), or health/well-being.

This chapter examined the relationships between work engagement and other facets of well-being at work. The well-being concept is viewed in different ways in the research literature. My goal was to clarify this point and propose a trilogy of facets of well-being (i.e., physical, psychological, and social) from research on POP. From this perspective, health and well-being “are not the mere absence of illness”; there is not simply an absence of negative symptoms but rather something else, i.e., positive states of mind where the presence of engagement, positive affect, connectedness, and flourishing, among other indicators, make well-being a complex psychosocial construct.

Without trying to be exhaustive, we learn some of the following lessons from past research about how work engagement and organizational well-being are related. First, being more engaged at work seems to protect the employee by providing positive psychological gains and then better physical well-being as indicated by less risk of cardiovascular disease, better sleep quality, and healthier job recovery, as well as higher physical energy and less exhaustion while working. I presented evidence about differences in these results based on personal, temporal, and contextual factors, with moderating and mediating variables that explain unexpected results. We have to consider these factors for both theoretical and practical reasons, in order to invest in positive psychological interventions in the workplace.

Second, work-engaged workers also manifest less anxiety, depression, and burnout as main indicators of negative psychological well-being. Thus, WE seems to help prevent or reduce anxiety and depression, rather than the other way around. The latest and most recent systematic review by Cortés-Denia et al. (Reference Cortés-Denia, Lopez-Zafra and Pulido-Martos2021) shows that WE is mostly related to a lower risk of suffering from stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and psychological tension. Among all these negative indicators of psychological well-being, it is clear that the most researched question has to do with the way WE is related to burnout in the workplace. The chapter shows how the two constructs are connected, and that work engagement research started due to results from burnout studies, as a kind of antipode of burnout. Abundant research compiled in systematic and meta-analytic studies demonstrates that WE adds something to burnout. The two concepts display empirically distinct relationships within the JD-R model, particularly in terms of drivers (i.e., challenge or hindrance demands, or job resources), but they also predict different consequences. Interestingly, the time and level of analysis are important variables, and recent results show that these constructs are reciprocally related over time, but the effect of burnout on engagement seems to be stronger than the effect of engagement on burnout. Moreover, engagement and burnout differ at a deeper psychological level because they are related to each other at “different levels of analysis”. Hence, WE seems to occur at the task level, and burnout at the job level of analysis.

The relationship between WE and hedonic (psychological) well-being is fascinating as well. For example, WE has a causal temporal sequence where the more engaged employees are with their work, the more positive (and the less negative) affect they feel over time, such as greater hope and less envy. Feeling positive emotions at work leads employees to have higher levels of work engagement, but feeling engaged is also a pleasant experience that elicits future positive emotional states over time. In these relationships, personal resources such as self-efficacy, optimism, resilience, etc., interact with positive affect in the prediction of work engagement as important moderators in the development of WE over time. However, positive and negative emotions and affect have a complex relationship with WE, as described in the chapter. Recent research on this topic calls for more research to obtain a clearer picture of what it is happening in the world of emotions and work engagement relationships.

Further insights stem from research on how satisfaction and engagement are related to each other. They seem to be related but empirically distinguishable dimensions of employee well-being. Satisfaction indicates more pleasure, is past oriented, and shows need/expectation satiation, whereas WE is a multidimensional construct, future oriented, and more “motivational”.

As far as psychological well-being is concerned, WE is considered a kind of “eudaimonic psychological well-being indicator”. As documented in the chapter, the psychological construct(s) that make up the core of eudaimonic well-being are still an under-researched topic, mainly because they consist of a range of constructs that vary across researchers. Without trying to mention all of them, I focused on the three most researched constructs: meaningfulness, self-determination, and flourishing. In sum, although differences exist when considering time frames and between-and-within-person approaches, research shows that when employees feel that their work is meaningful to them, they invest energy in their work activity, feeling vigorous, dedicated, and fully absorbed in their tasks. In addition, when employees have their psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness satisfied, they feel intrinsically motivated by their work and fully work engaged. Regarding flourishing in the workplace, the research shows that, despite its umbrella nature, flourishing seems to be reciprocally related to WE.

Finally, the area of social well-being and its relationship with work engagement has been less researched compared to other facets of well-being. We know that the social context in organizations (i.e., social support from colleagues and supervisors) is a strong driver of work engagement. However, social well-being is not a job (social) resource; instead, it is related to the psychosocial experience of being socially accepted and coherent, finding society meaningful, and experiencing connection and relatedness with others. Research on giving and receiving help, prosocial motivation, group cohesion, and organizational connectedness has shown that these social well-being indicators are related to work engagement at the individual and the collective levels, such as teams and groups.

To end the chapter, I would like to present some ideas for a future research agenda about the relationships between WE and organizational well-being indicators. Much research has addressed links between WE and negative well-being (e.g., anxiety, depression, burnout). However, new changes in societies and the labor market, such as more digital societies or overqualified employees, require research on other negative indicators of psychological well-being, such as technostress, techno-aholism, and boredom at work, and their relationships with work engagement. Can WE protect against these negative psychological consequences of new changes in the labor market, or will WE simply suffer as a result?

Recent research on the way time and levels of analysis act on burnout and engagement relationships calls for more studies on the interaction between time and levels of analysis in predicting the development of burnout (at the job level) and engagement (at the task level). Furthermore, research on collective levels of work engagement, in other words team engagement, complicates the equation, which should be a new area of future research as well. Do team-engaged groups develop over time with different patterns of psychological well-being based on previous levels of burnout (at the job level) and task engagement?

The complex and fascinating results about how emotions/affect are related to WE call for more longitudinal and multilevel studies to obtain a clearer picture of this relationship, as well as more studies with physiological measures of emotions/affect facets and their consequences for WE. No studies were found using these techniques that could clarify the sometimes-contradictory results. For example, based on the self-regulation affective shift model of work engagement developed by Bledow et al. (Reference Bledow, Schmitt, Frese and Kühnel2011), we could obtain greater knowledge about the way WE emerges from the dynamic interplay between positive and negative affect over time, which neurological areas and mechanisms are activated in our brain, and so on.

More research is needed on the reciprocal relationships between work engagement and other well-being constructs outside the workplace, considering the permeable nature of the boundaries between work and beyond-work domains, by considering research on the spillover theory and expanding its implications.

Although social well-being and work engagement seem to be related, there is a need for more research on how different indicators of social well-being are related and how and under what conditions they are related to engagement. This is interesting because the idea that one’s own happiness and well-being can be linked to the perception of others’ well-being is called “psychological interconnection of happiness”, and it has been researched in cultural psychology by Uchida and colleagues in the Japanese context. For example, Hitokoto and Uchida (Reference Hitokoto, Uchida, Demir and Sümer2018) standardized a self-report scale called the “interdependent happiness scale” to measure individual perceptions of the interpersonally harmonized, quiescent, and ordinary nuances of happiness that represent the shared meaning of happiness in an interdependent cultural context. Research on work engagement (at different levels of analysis) and the psychological interconnection of happiness would be an interesting and inspiring area of research, as shown with other psychosocial constructs such as social capital (Fukushima et al., Reference Fukushima, Uchida and Takemura2021).

Finally, longitudinal studies should consider levels of analysis (i.e., individual, group, leader, and organization) in the explanation of the way individual and team engagement develop over time in organizations, in order to clarify these complex relationships over time and across different levels and their effects on different facets of well-being (physical, psychological, and social). Moreover, this new research will be useful for designing workplace interventions to increase work engagement (at different levels) and its effects on organizational well-being.