Antecedents, Consequences, and Context of Employee Engagement in Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

The article draws on Kahn and Saks to examine the extent to which specific nonprofit antecedents affect engagement and how engagement mediates employee and organizational consequences. Our findings suggest that the consequences of job and organization engagement are the behavioral outcomes—job satisfaction, commitment, and organization citizenship behavior—that nonprofits consider as critical to their organization and the employees emphasize. Perhaps the strongest evidence of the impact of engagement is the finding that nonprofit employees are more likely to experience these consequences and less likely to have intention to quit even if antecedents such as job characteristics and value congruence are less likely. Consistent with the literature, we also found that value congruence is a major antecedent in the relationship between nonprofit employees, their jobs, and the organization. Our research presents one of the first findings that result from empirically validated measures of engagement in nonprofits.