Back to Basics: Facilitating Engagement in Modern Work Environments Terri L. Griffith Santa Clara University tgriffith@scu.edu Emma Nordbäck Aalto University emma.nordback@aalto.fi John E. Sawyer University of Delaware sawyerj@udel.edu Ronald E. Rice University of California, Santa Barbara rrice@comm.ucsb.edu Abstract We seek a simple model of job characteristics and leadership for workers in a digitalized work place, where self-management is increasingly required as more work is done through enterprise digital and social media rather than face-to-face interaction. We look to work location, supervisor communication, feedback from the work itself, technology support, and work-related knowledge as precursors to work engagement. Here, we assess some of the basics of work design and management for employees across a range of work strategies as part of a larger study on flexible work and work-life balance in metropolitan areas. We find the strongest relationship with work engagement to come from feedback from the work itself and the knowledge to work independently. Supervisor communication also plays a role in work engagement, but location is surprisingly of little importance. We discuss the generalizability of these results and how future research can consider location in greater depth. 1. Introduction Oldham and Hackman [1] provide a retrospective on their job design work and speculate on the future. It is true that many specific, well-defined jobs continue to exist in contemporary organizations. But we presently are in the midst of what we believe are fundamental changes in the relationships among people, the work they do, and the organizations for which they do it (p. 466). They describe telecommuting, fluid job responsibilities, and independent contractors with simultaneous jobs of varying duration. Responsibility for engagement, motivation, and direction toward a goal is shifting to include all workers, not just professional managers. As work becomes more virtual, distributed, and flexible [2-6], through the use of enterprise social media and other tools, we have an opportunity to rethink work design as something carried out every day by everyone. We seek a simple model of job characteristics and leadership that can be applied by the general work population. We look to work location, supervisor communication, feedback from the work itself, technology support, and work-related knowledge as precursors to work engagement. Here, we assess some of the basics of work design and management for employees across a range of work strategies as part of a larger study on flexible work and work-life balance in metropolitan areas. Traditional work at the office, working from home, and a variety of hybrid approaches, including working at other organizations or public sites, are part of these employees’ environment. Our results show the value of supervisor communication and work design that focus on the development of knowledge through feedback from the work and technology tools, but interestingly, not through where one works. While we understand the difficulty of drawing conclusions from a non- significant finding, we think it is an interesting issue as more fluid work environments increase in popularity. 2. Substitutes for leadership Research on substitutes for leadership is foundational to our perspective. Kerr and Jermier’s introduction of substitutes for leadership [7] tried to untangle the dynamics of organizational leadership by examining substitutes and neutralizers of leadership behaviors. They offer that characteristics of the subordinate (e.g., ability), the task (e.g., feedback), and organization (e.g., cohesive work groups, spatial distance) can substitute for some basic leadership behaviors (e.g., initiating structure and consideration). [While a full review of the substitutes for leadership literature is beyond our scope, interesting reviews and perspectives are available e.g., 8, 9, 10]. Organizational routines serve a similar purpose, removing the need to debate and negotiate many common and frequent 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1530-1605/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2015.221 1829