The influencing outcomes of job engagement: an interpretation from the social exchange theory

Purpose Job engagement is a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of an individual, the perfect link between individual characteristics, job factors and job performance and the important path of an organization creating competitive advantages. Based on the viewpoint of the social exchange theory, the study assumes that employees will generate different influencing outcomes, which are, in order, task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, job burnout and counter-productive work behavior (CWB), according to the degree to which they psychologically expect that job engagement could receive organizational rewards, and discusses the relationships between job engagement and task performance, organizational citizenship behavior and other variables. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from the employees working as the salesmen from 48 computer and computer parts sales companies. The questionnaires of the study were the paired questionnaires. In total, 150 supervisor questionnaires and 633 employee questionnaires have been distributed. Under every sales head, there were some employees. In total, 501 valid paired questionnaires were collected. AMOS 23.0 was employed to process the data in the structural equation modeling and the causal relationships among all the factors were explored. Findings The results revealed that employee job engagement had positive influence on task performance and organizational citizenship behavior and had negative influence on job burnout and counter-productive work behavior; among all the moderating variables, organizational justice just significantly and negatively moderates job engagement and CWB. Originality/value Job engagement is an actively and fully absorbing state of an individual in the work, the perfect link among individual characteristics, job factors and job engagement and the important path of an organization creating competitive advantages. Most of the past studies have explored the positive effects of job engagement. This study tries to explore the positive and negative effects of employee’s job engagement based on the social exchange theory.