ABSTRACT
During the last decades there has been a steady reconfi guration of production processes in which large and medium-size companies have evolved into project-based organizations (Evaristo and Van Fenema 1999; Jansson and Ljung 2004), often working with geographically dispersed employees, or as Lipnack and Stamps (1997) call them, virtual teams. This global transformation derives from technological advancements and the need for fl exible units that are capable to address decompartmentalized working processes across space and time (Bell and Kozlowski 2002). Yet, as managerial and administrative organizational processes have majorly turned dislocated and digital, the efforts to engage and motivate employees have become a challenge (Crawford, LePine, and Rich 2010). The issue of employee satisfaction and engagement has become a vibrant topic within organizational management and has produced extensive scholarly debate (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes 2002; Gubman 2004). Increasingly, studies link employee engagement to performance and productivity (Saks 2006; Lockwood 2007).
