The Effect Of The Speed Of Engagement On Work Meaningfulness And Negative Emotion Of Employees

In the post-epidemic era,new office models such as the digital office are gradually breaking down the original home-work boundary.This puts a higher demand on employees to quickly switch into their work roles.Since the introduction of the concept of "work engagement",more and more studies have focused on the state of work engagement and its predictive effect on employee performance in the workplace,but few studies have examined the process of home-work role transition and the speed of work engagement as employees entering the workplace.Based on boundary transition theory,this study explores the theoretical basis of the concept of work engagement speed and explores the relationship between work engagement speed and employees’ sense of meaningfulness and negative emotions based on the extension-construction theory of positive emotions and the individual-environment matching theory,and analyses the specific role of work engagement level and individual conscientiousness in this psychological mechanism.Full-time employees were used as the subjects of this study.Study 1(n=228)was a cross-sectional study that used a questionnaire to collect variables such as speed of work engagement,level of work engagement,sense of work meaning and work emotion.We analyzed the mediating role of level of work engagement and the moderating role of conscientiousness.Based on this,Study 2(n=156)used a multi-temporal follow-up study to collect data from subjects at a total of six time points during the week to examine the effect of work engagement speed on subsequent work engagement levels on the same day.We further examined the mediating role of work engagement level on work meaningfulness and negative work emotions,and the moderating role of personality trait conscientiousness on work engagement speed on the same day.The moderating effect of work engagement level was also further examined.The results of the two studies show that:(1)the speed of work engagement positively influences the level of work engagement;(2)the level of work engagement mediates the relationship between the speed of work engagement and the sense of work meaning and work emotion: as the speed of work engagement increases,the level of work engagement increases,the sense of work meaning increases and the negative emotion decreases;(3)the role of personality trait conscientiousness plays a moderating role in the relationship between work engagement speed and work engagement level.The study found that the speed of work engagement has an increasing effect on the sense of meaningfulness of work and an improving effect on employees’ negative emotions,and examined the mediating effect of work engagement level and the moderating effect of conscientiousness.The concept of work engagement speed is explained from the perspective of boundary transition theory,which enriches the research field of work engagement and suggests corresponding suggestions for management to enhance employees’ work engagement speed and employees’ self-management of work engagement speed in practice.