The Antecedents Of Engagement Climate And Its Effect On Team Performance

Job engagement, which refers the simultaneous employment and expression ofa person’s ‘preferred self’ in task behaviors that promote connections to work and toothers, personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional) and active, fullperformances, plays a critical role in organizations since engaged employees bringcompanies with competitive advantages. By now, lots of scholars conduct studies toexamine the relationship between employee engagement, its performance outcomesand antecedents. However, there is a dearth of research investigated the climateabout employee’s job engagement at team or organizational level. The current studytried to propose a construct of engagement climate and conduct a team level study toexplore its antecedents and outcomes. Based on the job engagement theory,combining with servant leadership theory and researches about team cohesion, theauthor expected that servant leadership and team cohesion would promote theengagement climate. And the author hypothesized that engagement climate has apositive effect on team performance.The study used hierarchical regression with SPSS18.0to test the theoreticalhypotheses and AMOS6.0to test convergent validity and discrimination validity.And the data was collected from104teams of10IT companies. And finally, thevalid sample contains93teams.With engagement climate as dependent variable, the regression results showedthat servant leadership and team cohesion had significant positive influence onengagement climate. With engagement climate as independent variable, the resultsshowed engagement climate had a significant positive influence on teamperformance.The study proposed the definition of engagement climate and confirmed itspositive effects on team performance. Furthermore, team leaders could promoteengagement climate by providing service to their subordinate and building teamcohesion.