Work engagement and resilience at work: The moderating role of political skill

Abstract

Orientation: Faced with high contextual dynamics, organisational leaders are looking to resilience as a resource to help their employees manage their well-being as they adapt to the changes. Appreciating the complementary resource streams that help employees adapt or transform the context is an urgent priority.Research purpose: Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the study evaluated the moderating role of political skill in the relationship between work engagement and resilience at work.Motivation for the study: The quality of the employees’ personal and social resources at work could explain the degree to which they move beyond mere adaptation to thriving.Research approach/design and methods: The data collected from a convenient sample of over 200 individuals were used to construct a hierarchical multiple regression model.Main findings: There was a significant association between work engagement and resilience at work. The interaction term between work engagement and political skill accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in resilience at work.Practical/managerial implications: The result suggests that work engagement and political skill act in an integrative way to replenish adaptive resources at work. Organisational leaders must inculcate and nurture cultures that promote these complementary capabilities if they are to enjoy adaptive advantages. These capabilities are learnable and, hence, developable.Contribution/value-add: The study model deepens our understanding of the integrative mechanisms that nourish employee resiliency.

Social challenge stressors and work engagement: the moderating role of political skill

“…Furthermore, political skill facilitates the development of strong and consistent relationships with colleagues, supervisors, and other stakeholders. These positive connections serve as a buffer against social stress, providing a supportive network that can mitigate its negative impacts on engagement (Rutner et al, 2015;Sanhokwe & Chinyamurindi, 2023).…”

“…Specifically, we will draw upon the concept of work engagement (Bakker et al, 2008;Saks, 2019), which represents positive behavior affected by stress, and political skill (Ferris et al, 2012), which represents individual resources that moderate this relationship. The selection of these constructs stems from prior observations that have demonstrated significant associations with other typical factors in organizational psychology, such as resilience, organizational identification, and organizational commitment (e.g., Basit, 2020;Sanhokwe & Chinyamurindi, 2023). This selection allows for their incorporation into the hypotheses regarding the dynamics of social stress at work, which will be elaborated upon in the following section.…”