Feeling like what we do matters can inspire us to personally engage at work. In a previous blog post, I reviewed William A. Kahn’s 1990 paper, “On the Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Personal Disengagement at Work” and described his view that psychological safety is one of three psychological conditions (i.e., safety, meaning, availability) that drive personal engagement. Since personal engagement is a key topic for environment, health and safety (EHS) professionals, in this second post, I dive into Kahn’s conception of psychological meaningfulness and briefly describe its connections to psychological safety and personal engagement. I then describe how organizations can use these concepts to create new perspectives that could lead to safety innovations.  

To Kahn, meaningfulness “can be seen as a feeling that one is receiving a return on investments of oneself in a currency of physical, cognitive or emotional energy” (Kahn, 1990, p. 704). The idea is similar to psychological safety – but here, people engage when they feel a sense of equity or a greater return than the personal investment they put into their work.

The distinction here is between a unique person (who they are) and their outputs at work (what they accomplish at work). However, these divisions aren’t always as tangible. When they play out as patterns in the world, people express themselves through their roles in unique ways. Kahn points out three critical elements of personal engagement. Organizations can structure their processes such that task characteristics, role characteristics and work interactions make space for people to create and derive their own sense of meaning from work.

For example, people who see themselves as competent at their job, and who confront achievable challenges which offer a chance for personal and professional growth, find more psychological meaning in the workplace.

Some Incentives to Meaning

This is both fascinating and unsurprising at the same time. EHS professionals know how vital supportive work interactions, clear tasks and clear communication are in generating and sustaining a safe workplace. Let’s explore Kahn’s definition more to understand meaningfulness for our personal and organizational contexts.

 “Psychological meaningfulness can be seen as a feeling that one is receiving a return on investments of one’s self in a currency of physical, cognitive or emotional energy.”

The definition (Kahn, 1990, p. 704) has a money and time metaphor guiding it (i.e., currency, ROI). It talks of feelings and energies and alludes to conceptions of the self and not simply a “worker” or “employee.”

The phrase “meaningfulness can be seen” points toward an observer of the definition itself. It may be flexible or possible to see this definition more clearly from a particular position, but it doesn’t try to assume a monopoly on its meaning–it points to other possible definitions of meaningfulness. Further, this definition creates space between the idea, definition and the real human interpreting the words and actions behind it. This space allows a person to form images, imagine scenarios inclusive of meaning and share in the collaborative conceptual space. Here, people can share their own conceptualization of meaning, how they define it and come to a shared understanding with others and the organization.

“A feeling that one is receiving” assumes, from my view, two things 1) an embodied response (i.e., through feeling) and 2) an availability to receive. Feelings aren’t always visible, even to the person feeling them. This might be particularly the case in the workplace. In addition, people at times, feel pressure from others to actively hide their authentic feelings. Research in voice suppression (Shore and Chung, 2021) suggests this feeling is emphatically true for people from groups who have been marginalized–that, to fit in, one must assimilate to the expected cultural workplace norms and therefore must change their authentic embodied responses (e.g., voice, body language) to be accepted.

When we think about receiving and the ability to do so, we may point toward the insecurity of a culture that rejects gifts and has trouble receiving feedback or help, blocking its meaning-making processes. However, for EHS professionals, indicators that block the necessary emotional, cognitive and physical energies are time and production pressures, fatigue, environmental conditions, power and status, and financial compensation, among other things. For example, if someone feels pressed for time, they may not have the bandwidth to receive a sense of return on their personal investment in their work role; they may be too hurried.

In the above example, if the organization were to slow down, its people could derive a more profound sense of personal return on their personal investments at work. Availability, in this sense, is essential to a person for them to personally develop and organize a sense of meaning in the workplace.

Organizations can use this or similar thinking patterns to ground emerging safety concepts with data. For example, many organizations already track overtime as an indirect measure of fatigue. With a lens for meaning-making, organizations can look at fatigue as an indicator of “availability,” which, as Kahn points out, ultimately affects safety and engagement. With a refocused lens, the data may point to otherwise unseen problems organizations can address with new solutions.

Written by: Jordan Sannito, Research Associate – National Safety Council

References

Kahn, W.A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692–724.

Shore, L.M., & Chung, B.G. (2021). Inclusive Leadership: How Leaders Sustain or Discourage Work Group Inclusion. Group & Organization Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601121999580.

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During a recent interaction, a Campbell Institute member asked me to explain the difference between engagement and psychological safety. I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. I had some loose ideas – some intuition and gut-based hunches – but didn’t hold a clear distinction between the two, so I explored it more. Fortunately, after some research, I found a framework in a familiar paper that offers a starting point for safety professionals to differentiate and connect personal engagement with psychological safety.

William Khan’s paper, “On the Psychological Conditions for Personal Engagement and Disengagement,” describes three conditions that lead to personal engagement.

Definitions from Kahn (1990, p. 705)

He defines personal engagement as “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves.” (Kahn, 1990, p. 694). One of the conditions for personal engagement Kahn describes is psychological safety, or the “sense of being able to show and employ self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career” (Kahn, 1990, p. 705). We can think of psychological safety as similar to a climate – something sensed and felt by the people in it. When people sense a psychologically safe climate, they feel empowered to employ and express their whole self while in their work role. When doing so, they also express personal engagement.

However, when people feel psychologically safe to engage at work, it doesn’t always mean they can employ and express their whole selves. Psychological safety is a precursor to, or may co-occur with, personal engagement but is not a sufficient condition to generate it on its own. Two other conditions must emerge alongside psychological safety – psychological meaningfulness and psychological availability. 

Consider a situation where people feel empowered to speak up in a workgroup setting; they feel psychologically safe to engage. Even under this condition, engagement may prove difficult if people lack the cognitive, emotional or physical resources to express themselves in a given moment. For example, if they have been working overtime to the point of fatigue, they may not have the personal resources (e.g., are at the point of exhaustion) needed to speak up about a safety concern. We might expect a lack of engagement in a similar situation where people feel no return on their self-investment in their role at work. Contrast these two examples with a situation where all three psychological conditions are active and employees are engaged in their work. Those personally engaged employees can help environment, health and safety efforts enhance an organization’s safety culture.

The original question has opened up more opportunities for the Campbell Institute to connect safety research with engagement research. This blog serves as the first post in a larger miniseries exploring the psychological conditions to personal engagement – psychological safety, psychological meaningfulness and psychological availability.

Written by: Jordan Sannito, Research Associate – National Safety Council

References

Edmondson A., Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23–43.

Kahn, W.A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, 692–724.

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Research and observation will show that people mirror each other’s dispositions – things such as vocal tone, posture, inflection, and so on. It may be surprising, but more than just dispositions, people share and absorb each other’s emotions, too (Petitta et al., 2021). The process where people send emotions back and forth to each other is called emotional contagion in the research literature.

Emotional contagion in the workplace is the process of passing and absorbing emotional content and its relative intensity from and to colleagues. We might think of emotional contagion as something like tossing a ball. The ball is the emotion, and anyone who catches it then holds that emotion but can also pass it to someone else.

Further, emotions can be contagious regardless of how someone experiences them (e.g., pleasantly/unpleasantly) – people can pass on feelings with a different emotional valence such as anger or joy. When it comes to the workplace, emotions themselves aren’t always directly connected to a safety incident but play an indirect role. As for safety leaders, understanding that emotions can prime or help prevent a safety incident is another key to strengthening safety culture.

Research

In a set of papers released over the past few years, researchers from Italy and the United States, using data from both countries, explored emotional contagion and its effects on workplace safety as mediated by sleep, health, cognitive failure, moral disengagement, economic stressors and others.

The authors found anger contagion can increase rates of cognitive failures. Cognitive failure can then play a role in creating higher rates of workplace incidents (Pettit et al., 2019). Emotional tensions can also create environments where people violate safety rules and use moral justifications for such, which can lead to higher rates of workplace incidents (Petitta et al., 2021).

In another study, the authors found perceptions of job-related financial stress change depending on the type of contagion in the workplace. They examined anger and joy and found anger contagion amplifies one’s financial stress. On the other hand, the emotion of joy reduces individual perceptions of financial stress (Petitta et al., 2020). Anger contagion at work predicts higher levels of sleep disturbance and ultimately increases the number of safety incidents. Additionally, production pressure affects rates of safety incidents even more (Petitta et al., 2021).

This research shows emotional effects carry a residue that transcends particular contexts. Because of this, the emotion itself being passed on and absorbed serves as a job resource or job demand. Joy as a resource can act to prevent incidents through things like social bonding, whereas anger can increase stress, among other things, and ultimately prove hazardous (Petitta et al., 2020). In this sense, joy enhances and empowers where anger detracts and impairs.

What Safety Leaders Can Do

Emotional contagion works through implicit and explicit cognitive processes (Tee, 2015). People can pass or absorb emotions deliberately or without conscious awareness. Further, both anger and joy tend to be more contagious when their source is a supervisor (Petitta et al., 2020). Leaders can use knowledge of emotional contagion to observe members of their team for emotional cues, determine the sources of a particular emotional contagion, generate and share emotions and help implement focused training. Research also suggests implementing technologies (e.g., apps) that track sleep (Petitta et al., 2020).

Emotions can change quickly, so being attuned to the micro-shifts in the emotional state of team members can reveal just how vulnerable even a strong safety culture is. These vulnerabilities can also point toward methods for leadership adaptation to employee needs and can help an organization enhance employee physical and psychological safety.

Written by: Jordan Sannito, Research Associate – National Safety Council

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