Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Industrial Relations & Labor, Management, Business & Economics, Employee behaviour, Work engagement, Innovative work behaviour, Latent profile analysis, INNOVATIVE WORK BEHAVIOR, INDIVIDUAL INNOVATION, TIME PRESSURE, TEAM AUTONOMY, ENGAGEMENT, PERFORMANCE, CREATIVITY, RESOURCES, SATISFACTION, COMPLEXITY, 1503 Business and Management, Industrial Relations, 3505 Human resources and industrial relations, 3507 Strategy, management and organisational behaviour

Abstract:

The question of what constitutes a good job concerns employers, employees and policymakers alike. Given the multiple possible contingencies, this study applies a latent profile analysis (LPA) to employee data from the Belgian electricity sector to identify different job types based on the combinations of various job demands and resources. These job types are subsequently related to employee outcomes in terms of work engagement and innovative work behaviour, for which threshold values are computed using relative operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The combination of both methods reveals that low-strain jobs with high resources and reasonable demands perform the best in terms of work engagement. For innovative work behaviour, they perform equally well as active jobs which combine high demands with high resources. Employees in jobs with low resources and high demands (high-strain and very high-strain jobs) are less likely to be engaged and innovative.