Introduction

The notion that individuals can be ‘personally engaged’ in their work, investing positive emotional and cognitive energy into their role performance, was first proposed by William Kahn in 1990 in his seminal paper in the Academy of Management Journal. Since then, there has been a steadily growing stream of research, notably within the psychology field, that has sought to further explore the meaning and significance of engagement (Wollard and Shuck, 2011). Perhaps the reason that engagement has garnered so much attention lies in its dual promise of enhancing both individual well-being and organizational performance (Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008; Christian et al., 2011; Harter, Schmidt and Hayes, 2002), sidestepping the traditional trade-offs and tensions that exist between employers and employees that have for so long been the subject of debate within the human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations domains.