eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Work engagement is a concept that has been under inspection from various different points of view over the last two decades. The approaches range from personal, employee-centric views to managerial approaches. As engagement has been proven to have many benefits for both the individual and the organization, there has been much interest towards finding out the antecedents of engagement. However, most studies have been concentrated on people who can be defined as knowledge workers, with manual laborers receiving less interest.

This study focused on the personal experiences of engagement felt by manual laborers, and was conducted by means of ethnographic participant observation in the context of maintenance workers at Lassila & Tikanoja, a large Finnish property maintenance company. There were seven informants altogether, which were observed during six separate sessions. Additional information was obtained through discussions with Lassila & Tikanoja management and by studying the company’s management principles. In the initial phase of the study, the objective was to identify factors which affect engagement in the context. As a result, autonomy emerged as the most prominent antecedent. After this discovery, further analysis of the data was focused on identifying the psychological pathways autonomy affects engagement. The path framework of engagement introduced by Kahn (1990) and further developed by May et al. (2004) was used as a guide in sorting and analyzing the data.

The primary finding of the study was the strong relationship between autonomy and engagement in the research context. Furthermore, psychological meaningfulness was identified as the most prominent psychological pathway autonomy affects engagement through. Additional findings include the identification of maintenance work as complex and knowledge-intensive work, the observation of the maintenance worker’s culture as strong yet potentially vulnerable, the discovery of the homogeneity of the maintenance teams and the observation of Lassila & Tikanoja’s style of managing autonomy as a very hands-off approach.