Measuring the personal perspective on work engagement: An empirical exploration of the self-anchoring work engagement scale in Poland

PurposeWork engagement is among the most influential constructs in human resource management, but work engagement's current understanding overlooks what employees consider as engagement. The author aims to advance the human resources theory and practice by discussing the need for understanding engagement from the employee point of view, and the author explores the properties of a self-anchoring work engagement scale – the measure capturing the personal perspective on work engagement.Design/methodology/approachThe author has presented a conceptual discussion providing a rationale for capturing employee personal perspective on work engagement as supplementary to multi-item measures capturing researcher perspective. Based on empirical evidence, the author tests convergent and discriminant validity of self-anchoring work engagement in relation to job resources, job demands and burnout;the author confronts the nomological network of self-anchoring scale with previous work engagement meta-analysis.FindingsThe obtained results provided preliminary evidence supporting convergent and discriminant validity of self-anchoring work engagement. The analysis of the nomological network of self-anchoring work engagement in comparison to the previous meta-analysis revealed that self-anchoring work engagement might be more strongly related to challenging job demands than the multi-item researcher perspective work engagement.Research limitations/implicationsPractical implicationsSocial implicationsOriginality/valueThe author's findings provide a modicum of evidence that asking employees about self-assessment of employees' work engagement on a 0–10 scale provides researchers with access to a freely available measurement method of the personal perception on work engagement.Contribution to impact

Emergency forced pandemic e-learning – feedback from students for HEI management

The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges for higher education institutions (HEI), one of the most important being forced e-learning – the involuntary need to move all educational activities to an online environment. In this exploratory study, we aim to learn from students’ feedback on demands created by COVID-19 forced e-learning to provide HEI management with insights helpful in building educational policies that might promote students’ positive perception of distance learning in turbulent times. Based on a convenience sample of more than 600 university students we implemented multiple regression analysis to explore the relationships between e-learning demands experienced by students and the three dimensions of e-learning perception: emotional experience with e-learning, cognitive evaluation of e-learning, and study engagement in e-learning. Our findings have shown that the e-learning demand most strongly related to a negative perception of e-learning was students’ belief that during e-learning the university was plunged into chaos. This suggests that for students who participate in e-learning, the most important aspect of e-learning policy might be not, as we often intuitively think, the cutting edge e-learning platform & technology but rather effective reciprocal communication between HEI and students about the e-learning situation, allowing a perception of order to be created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Open Learning is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Motivation of Academics in Remote Teaching during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Polish Universities—Opening the Debate on a New Equilibrium in e-Learning

Online learning helps to continue education in the face of Covid-19 lockdowns and social isolation, but it might largely change characteristics of academic teachers’ jobs and, thus, have some unintended consequences for teachers’ motivating job potential. In this study, using a convenience sample of 202 academic teachers, we tested and supported the hypothesis that academic teachers perceived their motivating job potential as lower during the forced Covid-19 e-learning than before it. We also provided evidence that motivating potential of work during the forced Covid-19 e-learning is associated with work engagement and job satisfaction. Moreover, we provided a modicum of evidence that the relationship between the motivating job potential and academic teachers’ job satisfaction might be moderated by teachers’ assessment of university management actions during the Covid-19 situation, such that this association seems to be stronger among teachers who more positively assess university management. Our results provided initial evidence of possible unintended consequences of the pandemic-forced e-learning for academic teachers. Therefore, we suggested that socially sustainable e-learning required not only concentration on students and organizations of the education process but also on improving the teachers’ motivating job potential.

E-learning? Never again! On the unintended consequences of COVID-19 forced e-learning on academic teacher motivational job characteristics

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities worldwide are going into ?emergency mode??radically transforming education by switching to online and e-learning education. In the face of these emergent changes, many academic teachers who are unwilling to use e-learning or who lack the appropriate competences are suddenly being forced to teach via electronic devices and the Internet. But how will this COVID-19 forced e-learning influence academic teachers' motivation and performance? In this conceptual paper, drawing from Job Characteristics Theory?a model of human work motivation, we would like to discuss the possible changes in six motivational job characteristics of the academic teacher's job (task identity, task significance, skill variety, feedback, autonomy, social dimensions of the work) caused by COVID-19 forced e-learning. Our concise conceptual elaboration might spark a debate on the possible unintended consequences of COVID-19 forced e-learning.