Spread of Employee Engagement in a Large Organizational Network

Abstract

Behavioral statescan be transferred to others, leading people to behave in ways similar to those around them. Can this phenomenon of behavioral contagion be seen in the workplace? Using employees' organizational social media data and their workplace hierarchical network structure, we studied contagion across a large multinational corporation, focusing on an important workplace behavior - employee engagement. We measured employees' engagement based on their word choice in organizational social media, and we applied a longitudinal statistical technique which controls for homophily, employees' traits and prior expressions of engagement. We found that engagement and disengagement spread from one employee to another with direct peers exerting the strongest influence. While engagement-spread was more powerful laterally among people at the same organizational level, disengagement-spread followed the vertical managerial chain. Further, we found that disengaged co-workers exerted a stronger influence on employee's future engagement compared to the engaged co-workers. Our results suggest the need for organizations to sense and address workplace disengagement promptly. Moreover, our findings offer opportunities for using workplace interventions to promote engagement and mitigate disengagement.

Social Media and Ubiquitous Technologies for Remote Worker Wellbeing and Productivity in a Post-Pandemic World

“…This has been the key motivation to explore pervasive technologies to understand worker outcomes in unobtrusive and automatic ways [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. This new future of work thus draws on many years of effort in the computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI) community towards augmenting worker collaboration, coordination, and engagement [19,20,21,22]. The changing circumstances and work settings call for rethinking how to adapt these technologies for better assessing and understanding of worker behavior.…”

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“…Having a good understanding of co-workers' engagement in work can be helpful for assigning tasks, allocating resources, and maintaining the collaboration [3]. Furthermore, workers can also be inspired by sensing that their co-workers are engaged in performing their work [45]. In fully-distributed workplaces, however, workers have little control over the extent of their work practices being visible to other remote colleagues [38].…”

Is it more than allocating funds? Exploring the effect of enterprise crowdfunding on employee engagement

“…They have a sense of energetic and effective connection with their work activities and consider themselves as able to successfully deal with the demands of their job [29]. Moreover, engaged employees work with passion and are willing to drive organizational goals [12]. Consequently, employee engagement is associated with positive organizational outcomes, including increased productivity, higher performance, increased resilience, and generally higher organizational profitability [12], [30].…”

“…Moreover, engaged employees work with passion and are willing to drive organizational goals [12]. Consequently, employee engagement is associated with positive organizational outcomes, including increased productivity, higher performance, increased resilience, and generally higher organizational profitability [12], [30].…”