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Recently, employee engagement has emerged as a topic of great interest to both practitioners and academics, likely due to its association with numerous positive individual and organizational outcomes. While these associations are informative, leaders require specific practices, which they may enact in order to maximize the engagement levels of their employees. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, this study investigates specific practices that may foster employee engagement. First, 32 key informant interviews were conducted across the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administrations (VHA) to understand what practices lead to a more engaged workforce. Seven categories of practices emerged, including modeling engagement, information sharing, acquiring resources, promoting psychological safety, employee recognition, building a team orientation, and taking a personal interest in employees. Second, these seven practices were quantitatively tested and validated on a sample of 183 VHA medical facilities. Using multi-source, all seven practices correlated significantly with engagement and its three subfactors (i.e. cognitive, physical, and emotional engagement), with the exception of acquiring resources and employee recognition with emotional engagement. Findings are discussed, along with practical and scientific implications, limitations, and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee engagement has recently garnered vast interest from both the academic and practitioner communities, likely due to its link with numerous positive individual and organizational outcomes. Here, we introduce a new concept, unexpected work, which occurs when more resources (e.g., time, energy) from an individual are required than the individual originally anticipated. Findings from two lab experiments suggest that unexpected work has a generally negative relationship with engagement, with a particularly strong impact on the engagement subfactor of absorption. Further, our findings suggest changes in engagement may have a delayed relationship with performance. Findings are discussed along with limitations and implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student engagement has been linked to various positive individual level outcomes, such as classroom performance and well-being. However, with external factors (e.g., technology, part-time jobs, and social demands) competing for students' attentional resources, keeping students engaged in the classroom and in their programs of study becomes a daunting task for educators. This study aims to outline a step-by-step process for identifying factors driving student engagement in an academic program. We iteratively couple this outline with a case example, where we identify a set of antecedents related to student engagement and academic performance at a large Midwestern University. To identify potential antecedents of engagement in our case example, a mixed-methods, step-by-step process was utilized. This methodology revealed three higher-order factors impacting student engagement; namely, professor influence, learning environment, and student interaction. Results are presented and discussed, as well as limitations and implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]