Team Work Engagement Climate: A fertile ground for engagement in teams

Engaged teams are invaluable to their organization, achieving remarkable results through concentrated work, energetic collaboration, and mutual dedication. These teams balance the interests of the team with the motivation and needs of individual members. This dissertation explores how teams can collaborate in such an engaged manner, focusing on the main research question: “What does team work engagement entail and what stimulates and sustains its emergence?” The thesis addresses three research objectives: analyzing published research on team work engagement over the past twenty years, identifying attributes associated with team work engagement, and developing a reliable, valid, and replicable instrument to measure these attributes. The first objective was achieved through a systematic literature review of 52 studies from 2003 to 2023. Key insights include the predominance of quantitative research using theories on well-being, motivation, social dynamics, and cohesion. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al., 2002) and its team variants are commonly used to measure engagement, defined as “a shared, positive, and fulfilling, motivational emergent state of work-related well-being characterized by team vigor, dedication, and absorption” (Costa et al., 2014b). Team cognition, encompassing shared beliefs and action knowledge, is essential for collaboration and engagement. Antecedents such as the attractiveness of the work, collective efficacy, and team cohesion directly and indirectly influence team work engagement. The second objective involved qualitative research with eight teams over 18 months, including 110 semi-structured interviews. Responses were summarized into eight clusters, highlighting personal and collective characteristics of the TWE-Climate. Personal characteristics include commitment to the team, feeling respected and valued, and being utilized for strengths. Collective characteristics emphasize collective drive and focus, a sense of community, overcoming challenges together, and making progress collectively. These findings confirm the literature review insights and underscore the importance of the exchange between individual members and the team. The third objective was to develop and validate a questionnaire to measure the eight characteristics. Steps included content validation by experts, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and validation with various samples. The instrument demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity with related constructs and criterion validity with team work engagement, personal work engagement, and turnover intention. Contributions to the scientific debate include the validation of TWE Climate as a distinct concept from team work engagement. TWE Climate stimulates the emergence of team work engagement. TWE Climate comprises eight factors, including three ‘individual’ factors regarding the team members themselves and five ‘collective’ factors relating to the team as a whole. A validated scale to measure TWE Climate is developed which can be used to study team work in general and team work engagement in particular.