The emotional involvement in the workplace: An empirical study

Abstract

Purpose: In a multitude of studies, it is verified that the generation of positive attitudes for employees such as job satisfaction or job involvement, have a positive influence on productivity levels of companies. The current investigation focus on the identification of employee-profile -who is emotionally involved with their work activity- through the use of a set of individual, job related and attitudinal factors.

Design/methodology: A review of the literature about the main factors that affect the job involvement particularly on its emotional dimension has been completed. For its measurement at the empirical level, various items related to psychological well being of employees included in the IV European Working Conditions Survey-2010 are used. Moreover, those items are identified in Job Involvement Questionnaire (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965). Since then, an empirical and multidimensional study is carried out by applying a logistic regression model on the sample of 11,149 employees obtained with European survey cited previously.

Findings: The logistic regression model identifies the factors, which are directly related to emotional involvement at the workplace. Ultimately, is raised a definitive model that define the European employee-profile -who is emotionally involved at the workplace-: a rather aged person who has been working at his/her present place of employment for several years in a medium-sized company where possibly there exist a good working relationship between workers and their superiors –social support-. These employees are “white-collar” workers, have career advancement opportunities in the organizational hierarchy. They perform variety, flexible and complex tasks, which leads to satisfaction in terms of pay and working conditions.

Research limitations/implications: Emotional involvement has been measured through self-awareness and, therefore, the corresponding bias in the key variable must be assumed. In addition, the casual relationship between emotional involvement and the variables taken into account in our study must be relativized, as the data under study are cross-sectional and not experimental.

Originality/value: A global emotional involvement model has been estimated with which was confirmed the impact of the individual, job related or situational factors for both employees emotionally involved and those not involved.