Measuring the personal perspective on work engagement: An empirical exploration of the self-anchoring work engagement scale in Poland
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-01-2022-0002 |
| Published date | 12 July 2022 |
| Date | 12 July 2022 |
| Pages | 103-121 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
| Author | Konrad Kulikowski |
Measuring the personal
perspective on work engagement:
An empirical exploration of the
self-anchoring work engagement
scale in Poland
Konrad Kulikowski
Department of Management, University of Social Sciences, Lodz, Poland
Abstract
Purpose –Work engagement is among the most influential constructs in human resource management, but
work engagement’s current understanding overlooks what employees consider as engagement. The author
aims to advance the human resources theory and practice by discussing the need for understanding
engagement from the employee point of view, and the author explores the properties of a self-anchoring work
engagement scale –the measure capturing the personal perspective on work engagement.
Design/methodology/approach –The author has presented a conceptual discussion providing a rationale
for capturing employee personal perspective on work engagement as supplementary to multi-item measures
capturing researcher perspective. Based on empirical evidence, the author tests convergent and discriminant
validity of self-anchoring work engagement in relation to job resources, job demands and burnout; the author
confronts the nomological network of self-anchoring scale with previous work engagement meta-analysis.
Findings –The obtained results provided preliminary evidence supporting convergent and discriminant
validity of self-anchoring work engagement. The analysis of the nomological network of self-anchoring work
engagement in comparison to the previous meta-analysis revealed that self-anchoring work engagement might
be more strongly related to challenging job demands than the multi-item researcher perspective work
engagement.
Research limitations/implications –
Practical implications –
Social implications –
Originality/value –The author’s findings provide a modicum of evidence that asking employees about self-
assessment of employees’work engagement on a 0–10 scale provides researchers with access to a freely
available measurement method of the personal perception on work engagement.
Contribution to impact –
Keywords Work engagement, Self-anchoring, Single-item, Measurement
Paper type Research paper
If one wants to know what a person is like, the obvious solution is to ask him or her
Vazire and Mehl (2008, p. 1202)
Introduction –why measure work engagement with the self-anchoring scale?
In most work engagementmeasures, we do not directly ask, “Howwork engaged are you?”,but
ratherwe ask about a set of different questionsassuming they indicate the directlyunobserved
mental state of work engagement, e.g. questions related to energy, passion, dedication,
absorption and exhaustion (see, e.g. Demerouti and Bakker, 2008;May et al., 2004;Schaufeli
et al.,2006;Wefald et al.,2012). This multi-item measurement allows us to capture a directly
unobservedmental state of “engagement”, but itmight be susceptible to distortionscaused by
the way the author of measurement looks at social reality and defines the measured entity.
Personal
perspective on
work
engagement
103
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2049-3983.htm
Received 6 January 2022
Revised 28 April 2022
Accepted 20 June 2022
Evidence-based HRM: a Global
Forum for Empirical Scholarship
Vol. 11 No. 1, 2023
pp. 103-121
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2049-3983
DOI10.1108/EBHRM-01-2022-0002
Although multi-item questionnaires usually must pass tests for validity and reliability, stillat
the most basic level theyare based on their authors’ontological positions about the nature of
the construct under measurement. But different researchers might have different conceptual
perspectives on the workengagement, e.g. see a debate about the meaning of engagement as
captured by The Maslach Burnout Inventory vsUtrecht Work Engagement Scale (Leiter and
Maslach,2017;Schaufeli and De Witte,2017), the more general debateon engagement meaning
(Kahn, 1990;Maceyand Schneider, 2008;Maslach,2011) or the discussion if work engagement
exists as a separatedconstruct (Cole et al., 2012). Thesedifferences in ontological positionsare
related to multi-item measurement proliferation, as in the case of work engagement we have
several measurements approaches –the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale UWES, Shirom
vigor, Britt’s self-engagement measure (Wefald et al., 2012); Rich et al. (2010) job engagement
measure; Kuok and Taormina (2017) work engagement scale; Oldenburg Burnout Inventory
(Demerouti and Bakker, 2008); Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach et al., 2001); the
Intellectual, Social, Affective Engagement Scale (ISA Engagement Scale) (Soane et al., 2012),
Mayet al. (2004) engagement measure,the ProductiveEngagement Portfolioproposed by Matz-
Costa et al. (2014) or job engagement scale by Saks (2006). A variety of different work
engagement measurement methods are also used in business settings, among the most
influentialare as follows: Gallup Q12 Survey (2020b)andWTW (2022) employee engagement
surveys. Thus, multi-item work engagement measures might be considered the researcher
perspective measures (see Di Napoli and Arcidiacono, 2013) as they capture the work
engagement of other people through the prism of the given researcher’spositiononthe
natureof work engagement. Thistype of measurement,besides all its advantages,forces fitting
possibly different people’s personal and subjective perceptions of the work engagement into
the one-fits-all framework cast by a given team of researchers. Thus, we put forward a
proposition that it might be worthwhile to supplement the researchers’perspective
measurement of work engagement with measures of employees’perspectives on their work
engagement.
As the mental state of work engagement is directly unobservedfor researchers (we might
only observe its manifestation, e.g. energy put into work), it is “observed”by people who
experience them. Thus, asking people directly about their work engagement might provide
important information from a personalpoint of view, i.e. the employeesthemselves might be a
key informant and the source of information when it comes to unobserved constructs
experiencedby them (see Bergkvist and Ross iter, 2007;Cheung andLucas, 2014;Elo et al., 2003;
Jordanand Turner, 2008;Postmeset al.,2013;Wanouset al.,1997;Wanousand Hudy, 2001;Van
Hooffet al., 2007). For example, previousresearch has shown that if we want to learnsomething
about a person’s job satisfaction instead of asking a set of multiple questions,we presume to
represent different aspects of job satisfaction, and then by aggregating them, we might
ask about these aspects using only single-item questions (see Nagy, 2002 and also Allen
et al.,2022).
Similarly, we suggest that it might be useful to measure the personal perception of work
engagement based on self-anchoring, i.e. by directly asking participants about placing the
work engagement level they experience on a continuum spanning between the lowest and the
highest possible work engagement. The self-anchoring is “an attempt to apply the first-person
approach to the measurement of psychological variables”(Kilpatrick and Cantril, 1960, p 158),
and this attempt might allow capturing a unique, personal perspective on a person’s work
engagement. Participants “self-anchor”their responses based on their own perspectives,
assumptions, values or understanding of the issue in question. This method was described in
detail by Kilpatrick and Cantril (1960) and popularized by Cantril (1965) in his book The
Pattern of Human Concerns, who suggests, “This scale seems to provide a simple, widely
applicable, and adaptable technique for tapping the unique reality word of an individual (...)”
(Cantril, 1965, p 22). Nowadays, the most popular version of the self-anchoring scale is
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