Employee Engagement for an Increasingly Educated Workforce

Abstract. As organizations strive to increase employee engagement, they must seek to activate potentially underutilized employee resources. Over the past few decades, employees have become more educated. Through pursuing more education, individuals garner valuable personal resources such as experience managing competitive environments. Simultaneously, organizations also increasingly use team structures, posing new demands for employees. Using the job demands-resources perspective, we investigated how the interaction between education and team competitive climate impacts employee engagement. Using a multilevel dataset including 274 employees working for 64 teams in 44 organizations, we found that people with more years of education are more engaged in their work when working in a competitive team climate. Our findings suggest the importance of work demands for activating personal resources.