Engagement and Job Satisfaction are Not the Same Thing

As you read articles about leadership, you soon come to understand that engaged workers are satisfied workers. If people are highly involved in their work, they like the job, right?

Probably, a recent study says. But wait—there's more!

"Engagement is defined as a positive relationship with one's work characterized by a sense of meaning, competence, and impact," according to Gene Alarcon and Joseph Lyons of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. Earlier studies found it breaks down into three components, they say:

• Vigor—"the abundance of energy such as mental resilience and persistence despite difficulties"
• Dedication—"a sense of significance, enthusiasm, challenge, pride, and inspiration"
• Absorption—"intense concentration and engrossment with work. When an individual is absorbed, time passes by quickly, and it is difficult to disconnect from one's work."

When first defined, scientists thought engagement was the opposite of burnout, and here we get the first reminder that assumptions can be wrong. Later research showed that greater workload demand increases engagement but lowers satisfaction, the authors report. You can be very engaged and end up burned out. This makes it reasonable to ask whether engagement and satisfaction are the same thing.

Alarcon and Lyons asked by analyzing samples used in three previous studies. Two were of U.S. undergraduate students who also worked at least half-time. The third used responses from 394 full-time employees who had volunteered to be involved in online surveys. Each of these samples raises questions of how well the data applies to the average worker (its "external validity," to use the scientific term). Obviously, college kids may be very different from all workers, and so might study volunteers with easy computer access and an interest in science, 74% white.

These samples were useful because they had each taken three questionnaires that have been tested by different researchers and found to be good measures of:

• Engagement's components.
• Job satisfaction—"how much one is fond of one's job."
• Areas of work life (AWL)—perceptions of "workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values."

The researchers randomly combined responses from the three samples into two big ones and performed factor analysis on the results. Factor analysis tests whether answers tend to clump together in predictable ways. Alarcon and Lyons found that engagement, satisfaction, and AWL showed up as three different patterns.

The authors write that engagement relates to the content of the work, while satisfaction relates to the position in which the work takes place. I regularly ask people if they like their jobs. Frequently I get the phrase, "I enjoy the work," followed by a pause. They like the work, but not their manager or the company rules or something. Alarcon and Lyons give a clear example:

The job is a specific instance of employment, such as a nurse in a specific hospital, in a specific position such as emergency room personnel. The work content comprises the actual duties one is performing, such as a nurse's requirement to exhibit empathy, draw blood, and check on the general well-being of patients. In the nurse example, the nurse may not find much job satisfaction from the context but may be engaged with the work nonetheless.

An engaged nurse may still switch to a different hospital or department. An excellent software developer I know, a hard worker with unique skills on his team, just left a good company abruptly. Dissatisfaction with a manager or pay, or those AWL factors above, might lead to a job change without any change in engagement.

However, the three variables weren't that different. For the most part, a study participant's job satisfaction and engagement ratings lined up with ratings on the five factors of AWL. People with the same feelings about the level of fairness at their job site, for example, usually also reported the same levels of satisfaction and engagement. That pattern was not as clear, however, for the other four AWL factors. Confounding this discussion is that different components of engagement were involved depending on the AWL rating, but we don't have room in this post to go into that. Suffice to say it is dangerous to claim "engagement" impacts a measurement without asking, "Do you mean vigor, dedication, or absorption?"

The lesson is, just because everybody on your team works hard and voluntarily puts in long hours, that does not mean they are happy in their jobs. Last year we saw a number of polls indicating that at least a third of U.S. workers intended to look for another job as soon as the economy turned around, while at the same time overall productivity (output per worker) was reaching new heights. After multiple months of improving employment numbers, the time may be now. If your company has continued to "run lean" even though your profit margins are improving, you may be about to earn a tsunami of turnover. I think "run lean" often is bad-manager-speak for "getting by on too few people."

At the team level, it is time to do some serious workload planning and consider whether you really have the ideal number of people in the group. A project team I am working with just got hit with the largest scope change I have seen in my career. It spent six hours planning the next three months, with all members working late into the night. But the result was hard numbers allowing the team to go back to management and say, "We need help." In this case the team leader was already working on it, an awareness which helps explain his team's low turnover rate. The numbers will still help in the allocation of those new resources.

Hard workers are a good sign of job satisfaction, but not a perfect one. Do not assume that your co-worker's "head down" dedication to the work equals her dedication to your team. And if someone claims that engagement will lead to higher job satisfaction, tell 'em "it ain't necessarily so."

Action Item: Suggest your team bring in HR or an outside consultant to perform an anonymous job satisfaction survey. Have the team design and implement solutions to any issues identified, preferably without the manager present.

Source: Alarcon, G., and J. Lyons (2011), "The Relationship of Engagement and Job Satisfaction in Working Samples," The Journal of Psychology 145(5):463.