نگرانی درباره مشارکت بیشتر: ناامنی شغلی مدیران و اهمیت فرهنگ سازمانی Voicing Concerns for Greater Engagement: Do Supervisor’s Job Insecurity and Organizational Culture Matter?

1. Introduction Engaged employees are assets for any organization primarily because they are vigorous, dedicated, and fully absorbed in their work role (Van De Voorde, Veld, and Van Veldhoven, 2016). Therefore, the efforts put in by scholars in the direction of exploring the factors affecting employee engagement are of paramount importance (Akhtar, Boustani, Tsivrikos, and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2015). A sizable literature provides evidence that supervisors’ positive behavior and other related organizational factors have a strong effect on the level of employee engagement (e.g. Hsieh and Wang, 2015; Pohl and Galletta, 2017; van Dierendonck, 2015; Zhong, Wayne, and Liden, 2015). Most studies examine the extent to which positive ‘motivational’ factors enhance work engagement levels of the employees (e.g. Barrick, Thurgood, Smith, and Courtright, 2015; Yadav and Rangnekar, 2015; Joo and Lee, 2017). However, the role of negative factors cannot be completely written off (Ivtzan, Lomas, Hefferon, and Worth, 2015). Factors such as supervisor’s job insecurity may reduce employees’ attachment with their work (Wrape, 2015) because insecure supervisors perceive subordinates as a threat and tend to create hurdles to ensure that they do not perform (Scharff, 2014). Therefore, the current study examines if employees voice their concerns to reduce the negative impact of supervisor’s job insecurity on their work engagement levels. It also investigates the role of organizational culture in affecting the negative relationship between a supervisor’s job insecurity and the subordinates’ voice. Since inception of ‘personal engagement’, a term coined by Kahn (1990), researchers have conceptualized engagement at work in different forms such as state engagement, work engagement, employee engagement, and job engagement among others. In the work setting, work engagement consisting of vigor, dedication, and absorption is the most popular among scholars (Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá and Bakker, 2002). Whereas personal engagement refers to the extent to which individuals discretionarily attach their ‘personal self’ with their role, work engagement is the degree to which employees are vigorous, dedicated, and absorbed at work. Vigor is defined as deploying high levels of energy and mental resilience with willingness to invest effort in one’s work and persistence even in the face of difficulties. Dedication is a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride and challenge, whereas, absorption is described as being fully concentrated and deeply engrossed in one’s work. In summary, work engagement can be conceptualized as a sub-set of personal engagement (Christian, Garza, and Slaughter, 2011). In the present study, the focus is on work engagement and synthesizing it further as it is by far the most researched engagement type that researchers have established.