The psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety and availability and the engagement of the human spirit at work

Building on Kahn’ s (1990) ethnographic work, a e eld study in a U.S. Midwestern insurance company explored the determinants and mediating effects of three psychological conditions ‐ meaningfulness, safety and availability ‐ on employees’ engagement in their work. Results from the revised theoretical framework revealed that all three psychological conditions exhibited signie cant positive relations with engagement. Meaningfulness displayed the strongest relation. Job enrichment and work role e t were positively linked to psychological meaningfulness. Rewarding co-worker and supportive supervisor relations were positively associated with psychological safety, whereas adherence to co-worker norms and self-consciousness were negatively associated. Psychological availability was positively related to resources available and negatively related to participation in outside activities. Finally, the relations of job enrichment and work role e t with engagement were both fully mediated by the psychological condition of meaningfulness. The association between adherence to co-worker norms and engagement was partially mediated by psychological safety. Theoretical and practical implications related to psychological engagement at work are discussed. To explore the challenge to the human soul in organizations is to build a bridge between the world of the personal, subjective, and even unconscious elements of individual experience and the world of organizations that demand rationality, efficiency, and personal sacrifice . . . we must be willing to shift our viewpoint back and forth between what organizations want of people and what constitutes human complexity: the contradictory nature of human needs, desires, and experience. (Briskin, 1998, p. xii.) This quote from Briskin (1998), an organizational consultant, reflects the challenges that managers and researchers of organizations face as they seek to understand and

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