“Work engagement” refers to employees’ positive feelings about their work. When employees are engaged, they find their work to be personally meaningful, have positive feelings about their work, consider their workloads to be manageable, and look forward to continued employment. Their work fulfills them.
In the GOT study, we measured work engagement using 11 indicators adapted from the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES).1 This scale is a standardized tool used worldwide to assess employee work engagement. For the GOT study, we asked employees to note how frequently they experienced their work in each of 11 positive ways. Possible scores ranged from one (never) to seven (always). Averaging the scores yields a measure of work engagement, with one representing no engagement and seven representing maximum engagement.
When we tallied the scores of all the respondents, controlling for demographic factors, job characteristics, and age-related factors,ii employees working in the young-developing countries showed a higher level of work engagement on our seven-point scale (5.77) than did those in the old-developed countries (5.26). The difference is small but statistically significant.