All by myself: How perceiving organizational constraints when others do not hampers work engagement

Abstract

Organizational constraints (OCs) represent work conditions that interfere with employees’ performance. Although employees share the same work environment, perceptions of OCs may vary among team members. In this study, we examined employee–teammate perceptual congruence and incongruence regarding three types of OCs (i.e., social, structural, and infrastructure) and the associated consequences for employee work engagement among health care employees from two Spanish hospitals (N = 141). Multilevel polynomial regression with response surface analyses revealed that the perceptual congruence and incongruence effects depended on the type of OCs. Congruence in perceptions was linked with greater work engagement only for social OCs. Incongruence had an effect in cases of social and structural OCs, but not infrastructure OCs: work engagement was worse when an employee rated OCs as higher (i.e., more problematic) than their teammates did. Our findings suggest that the negative effects of OCs are additionally exacerbated by perceptual incongruence with teammates and indicate the need to include social contexts in the study of work environment perceptions.