What could highly engaged workers gain from mental health promotion programs? An exploratory analysis of secondary outcomes of brief daily workplace well-being programs

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Work engagement predicts essential outcomes at the employee, team, and organizational levels. A host of the previous studies assumes that the more work engagement, the better. However, an emerging line of research has proposed that work engagement might also have its dark side. Overly high work engagement can be detrimental to health and job performance. Over recent years, researchers have turned their focus on implementing interventions to enhance employees’ work engagement. So, the question arises, has the intervention program a cumulative effect on work engagement? Examining the empirical findings of a brief daily workplace well-being intervention for community mental health workers, the current paper challenges the assumption of the solely bright side of work engagement. We hypothesized that trajectories of the highest and lowest quarters of work engagement reveal a converging pattern after the intervention. Methods: We delivered a daily workplace intervention in the community with a sample of mental health workers (N = 84). Of the whole sample, we compared participants from the highest quarter (HWE, N = 25) and the lowest quarter (LWE, N = 23) of work engagement level at baseline (T0). Measures were taken at baseline (T0) and one-month intervals during a 3-month intervention (T1, T2, T3) and 3-month follow-up (T4, T5, T6). Measures included work engagement, work burnout, physical distress, positive and negative affect, daily spiritual experience, and collective psychological organization. We used repeated-measures multivariable analysis of variance (MANOVA) and t-tests to compare HWE and LWE groups with respect to work engagement, work burnout, positive affect, and negative affect. Results: MANOVA revealed significant Time × Group interaction effects on work engagement (2 p = .437, p < .001) and its three factors (vigor: 2 p = .421, p < .001; absorption: 2 p = .382, p < .001; and dedication: 2 p = .342, p < .001). Regarding positive affect, results revealed significant Time × Group interaction effects (2 p = .102, p = .027). Interaction effects were non-significant on work burnout and negative affect. The within-group comparison revealed that the intervention had positive and incremental effects on work engagement and positive affect on the LWE group, whereas the intervention had negative and decreasing effects on work engagement in the HWE group. The trajectories of the HWE and LWE groups appeared to be converged to the norm after the intervention, which could be a moderate, healthy, and optimal level. Conclusions and Implications: The current study challenges the assumption of the solely bright side of work engagement. Different patterns for work engagement were observed for HWE and LWE groups. In the case of community mental health workers with excessive work engagement, they might benefit from the intervention by recovering themselves from unhealthy over-immersed working status. What our results indicate is that the higher work engagement might not necessarily be the better. Future studies should consider both the bright and dark side of work engagement and its effects on individual outcomes, such as health, well-being, and job performance.