Work Engagement and Organizational Changes: Relationship and Facilitating Factors

Abstract: Working life is continuously changing and there is a greater responsibility on the individual to be able to adapt to change. For employees to be able to take on this responsibility and to be high performers, organizations need their employees to have high work engagement. This study therefore investigated the relationship between work engagement, organizational change, and employees’ perception of change; and factors that can facilitate work engagement. A convergent parallel mixed method was used which contained a survey and semi-structured interviews, and the participants was the white-collar workers (n = 63) within one organization that has and are going through episodic changes. The result showed no statistically significant relationship between perception of change scores and work engagement scores, however a connection was found in the thematic analysis of the interviews. The result from the survey and the interviews indicated that work engagement can be high in an organization that is characterized by change. The interviews moreover revealed that organizational changes can affect work engagement, and several factors that can facilitate work engagement were identified on an organizational- and job level.