The measurement of flow and social flow at work: a 30-year systematic review of the literature

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/PR-07-2018-0240
Pages537-570
Published date19 November 2019
Date19 November 2019
AuthorPedro Jácome de Moura Jr,Carlo Gabriel Porto Bellini
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM
The measurement of flow and
social flow at work: a 30-year
systematic review of the literature
Pedro Jácome de Moura Jr and Carlo Gabriel Porto Bellini
Department of Management,
Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review three decades of the literature on flow measurement and
propose issues to advance research on the measurement of social flow at work.
Design/methodology/approach In a systematic literature review, the authors analyzed 143 articles
published in the first three decades (19832013) of scholarly publications on flow measurement, of which
84 articles used scales to measure flow and 16 articles used scales to measure flow at work.
Findings The main findings are: flow is frequently measured in association with other constructs or by
means of proxies; flow measurement is highly dependent on a studys purposes and context; flow is mostly
studied at the level of the individual and, when studied beyond the individual, the measurement of flow in
groups is simplified as an aggregation of individual-level measures; and social flow at work is an
underresearched construct that nevertheless impacts organizations in important ways, thus deserving a
specific research agenda.
Research limitations/implications The first limitation refers to the databases included in the review.
There is always the possibility that important works were ignored. Another limitation is that the coding
procedure was highly dependent on the authorsdiscretion, as it did not include independent coding and
formal assessment of agreement among coders. But the greatest limitation may refer to our very perspectives
on flow, flow measurement and social flow at work, as they are highly attached to current models instead of
seeing the issues with different lenses. This limitation is also present in the literature.
Practical implications Reviewing three decades of scholarly publications on how flow has been
measured contributes to organizations in their planning for person-job fit. The measurement of flow can
reveal if and when flow correlates with personal characteristics and organizational events, thus serving to
inform initiatives on personnel development, acculturation and job design. However, considering that flow as
a social phenomenon has been conceived in superficial terms, that a vast number of empirical studies were
developed with non-professional subjects, and that flow measurement involves significant adaptations to
each situation, organizations are thus advised to be careful in adopting extant instruments.
Originality/value This study provides a rich account on how flow measurement has been addressed in the
scholarly literature, and it calls attention to research opportunities on social flow at work.
Keywords Systematic literature review, Flow theory, Measurement, Flow at work, Social flow,
Positive psychology, Team motivation, Team performance
Paper type Literature review
Introduction
The relationship between strategies for human resources management and organizational
performance has been investigated at the individual, group and organizational levels
(Den Hartog et al., 2013; Jiang et al., 2012). Continuously surveying employee motivation is
one of such strategies (Den Hartog et al., 2013), and research on the related phenomenon of
team motivation is organized in six topics: team design, team needs, team goals, team
self-regulation, team efficacy and team affect (Park et al., 2013). Such topics are among the
interests of positive psychology (Bandura, 1977; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Demerouti et al.,
2012), a field that has been instrumental to frame the human factors and performance in the
work environment (Demerouti et al., 2012).
Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) pioneered the positive psychology movement.
It conceives human motivation as potentially self-rewarding (autotelic) and posits that high
levels of personal commitment to a task occur when an individual is in a mental state known
Personnel Review
Vol. 49 No. 2, 2020
pp. 537-570
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-07-2018-0240
Received 5 July 2018
Revised 17 December 2018
29 April 2019
Accepted 9 July 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
537
A 30-year
systematic
review of the
literature
as flow. Flow depends on the balance between a challenge (environmental opportunities for
action) and ones skills to act on the challenge, as well as on that balance being constantly
shaken by the challenges increasing complexity (Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini, 1985).
Flow is influenced by the presence of other individuals (Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter, 2003;
Privette and Bundrick, 1991), thus, in social contexts, the occurrence of flow in an individual
tends to be perceived by others, what in turn may lead to a shared state of flow, or social
flow (Engeser and Schiepe-Tiska, 2012).
Although the measurement of flow has been a concern since the first studies of the
phenomenon (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1977) and systematic compilations are available
(e.g. Engeser, 2012; Swann et al., 2012; Hoffman and Novak, 2009), measurement remains
focused on individual perceptions of flow, thus imposing limits to a more complete
understanding of the experience at a social level. Moreover, a number of other interests are
also not addressed in current reviews: the scales that are used for flow measurement both in
individuals and in work teams; the contexts of flow (such as in learning situations, at work,
during sport activities, recreation, etc.); the scales that are used in each context;
the constructs that are possibly measured with flow in order to address the subtleties of the
phenomenon and particular manifestations; and multiple methodological aspects of scale
development. The present study addresses such issues in a systematic literature review,
and, in doing so, sheds light on the particular interest of measuring social flow at work.
Our intention to review the measurement of social flow at work is further motivated by
three issues.First, flow in individualsis consistentlyreported as having a positiveinfluence on
work outcomes (Heyne et al., 2011). Second, the increasing complexity of work has led
organizations to count on teams to achieve their g oals (Katzenbach and Smith, 2003). And
third, as an individual in flow may contaminateothers to pursuetheir own states of flow at
work (Bakker et al.,2011, p . 443), it is likely that social flow at work is present in organizations
and, as such, the literature may have already reported the phenomenon to some degree.
The article is organized as follows. First, we present a brief view of flow theory in the
positive psychology literature, highlighting issues that are well established and issues that
deserve more attention in empirical studies. Second, we present our systematic literature
review, which consists of two broad searches: a first search based on a snowball rationale
aimed at building a chain of connected studies on flow measurement starting with a
previous literature review; and a second search based on the more traditional procedure of
searching for specific strings in electronic databases. Third, we discuss the results of the
searches along with implications for research and practice, limitations and future studies.
And fourth, we present conclusions, which are mostly concerned with the still fragile idea of
a social perspective of flow and the need to establish a specific research agenda for it.
Theoretical background
Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1982) explains human motivation in dimensions that
characterize an individuals self-rewarding experience and the attainment of high degrees of
personal engagement in tasks what is best known as the state of flow, one in which an
individual is immersed in an activity without reflective self-consciousness but with deep
sense of control(Engeser and Schiepe-Tiska, 2012, p. 1). Flow is originally defined in nine
dimensions (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Engeser, 2012): definition of the tasks to be done
(the balance between challenge and skills); definition of clear goals; immediate feedback;
sense of control over actions; deep involvement that leads to automation and spontaneity
( fusion of action and consciousness); deep involvement that removes frustrations and
concerns from consciousness; forgetfulness of the self (loss of self-consciousness); changes
in the perception of time; and autotelic (self-rewarding) experience.
At work, there is evidence that in-flow individuals are cognitively more efficient than
others (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and that flow correlates with perf ormance scores
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(Demerouti, 2006). Outstanding performance is due to the flow experience itself, as it
stimulates the search for better outcomes, but also due to satisfaction that is leveraged by
those outcomes, which returns to the process as reinforcing inputs (Engeser and Rheinberg,
2008). The occurrence of flow at work also influences the well-being of individuals after the
work hours, particularly regarding the levels of energy and exhaustion (Demerouti et al.,
2012; Schippers and Hogenes, 2011). Much like the levels of motivation in individuals being
associated with the presence of flow and leading to important work outcomes, team
motivation is a concern that has been attracting greater interest in the literature (Park et al.,
2013). Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume that team motivation will be related with
manifestations of flow at the level of organizational groups, thus our interest in the study of
social flow at work.
Another interest refers to how flow is measured. The measurement of flow was first
addressed in Larson and Csikszentmihalyi (1983) with the experience-sampling
method (ESM). ESM appeared in the literature in 1977, but not for flow measurement at
that time, as a result of a 1976 work by Prescott, Csikszentmihalyi and Graef
(Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1977). The 1976 proposition was published only in 1981 (Prescott
et al., 1981). The ESM method requires participants to answer a short questionnaire, which
is usually focused on the challenge-skill dimension of flow (Jackson and Eklund, 2002)
whenever participants receive a randomly sent signal through a communication device
(Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini, 1985). ESM has been used in this sense in the human
and social sciences (Fatemeh, 2013; Uy et al., 2010) by means of a data collection
instrument (usually, a questionnaire-type scale) developed specifically for each study
(e.g. Novak et al., 2000).
However, the application of ESM interrupts the activity being done by the individual,
thus arguably interfering on that individuals state of flow. As an alternative, the use of
scales to measure flow during interview sessions has been proposed, such as the flow state
scale (FSS, Jackson and Marsh, 1996) and one of its extensions (FSS-2, Jackson and Eklund,
2002), as well as the dispositional flow scale (DFS, Jackson et al., 2008; Jackson and Eklund,
2002; Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988) and the flow short scale (FKS, Engeser
and Rheinberg, 2008; Rheinberg et al., 2003). Those scales have been used to measure
phenomena occurring along with flow (e.g. absorption and concentration), and flow is not
necessarily measured in all its nine original dimensions. Moreover, the specific dimension
on the balance between challenge and skills is often used alone to measure flow
(e.g. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1987; Moneta, 2012). Also of note is that anti-flow
constructs have been of interest for measurement, such as anxiety, boredom and frustration
(Allison and Duncan, 1987), thus adding complexity to the tradition of correlating flow with
other constructs (Engeser and Schiepe-Tiska, 2012).
Overall, the idea of flow appeals to common sense and is related with other constructs of
much interest in the human factors and organizational literature. However, this is also
reason for some conceptual overlapping and misunderstanding, what has eventually led to
poorly defined construc ts (Webster et al., 1993) and problems for mea surement
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Jackson et al., 2008; Jackson and Eklund, 2002). Thus, a review
of the literature on flow, flow measurement, flow in groups and flow at work should consider
that other phenomena that are closely related with, but different from, flow may have been
instrumental to address flow in practice.
Method
Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are employed to find insightful knowledge on a topic of
interest in relevant literature by means of rigorous search, analysis and synthesis. SLRs
follow a protocol that specifies the research questions and procedures, including the
definition and documentation of the search strategy, the description of the criteria for
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A 30-year
systematic
review of the
literature

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