Drive Your Project Team’s Engagement: A mixed methods study of engagement drivers beyond rewards and punishment

Sammanfattning: Project teams lack the ability to incentivize engagement. To cope with increasingly dynamic environments businesses adopt temporary organizational forms, such as project teams, that promise more adaptability but not seldom lack clear structures of power and authority. Given that research has repeatedly underlined the importance of engagement for the economic thriving of businesses, project teams seek methods to drive engagement that are within their application scope. This study aims to identify the most effective engagement drivers and to understand what their effectiveness depends on, mainly focusing on individuals’ career orientations. Building on existing work on engagement it asks: What factors engage project members the most and does their career orientation and career self-awareness interplay with the effectiveness of the engagement factors? In this context engagement is defined as being fully involved, characterized by the three states of vigor, dedication, and absorption, across the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social dimension. Based on a review of the literature on engagement, a survey was distributed to the team members of a student project. Afterwards, the participants’ career orientations were identified with an online test. Lastly, a randomly selected group of the participants was interviewed to follow up on survey responses. Analysis of the data suggest: The most effective drivers of engagement address the social dimension of teamwork. The results indicate that it can be distinguished between universal engagement drivers that motivate nearly anybody to engage and conditional engagement drivers which effectiveness depends on the career orientation but not career self-awareness of the individual. Moreover, this study discovered additional characteristics, such as assertiveness, egocentricity, and team- or task-focus that seem to affect the effectiveness of engagement factors. However, more research is needed to further validate the findings and hypotheses by considering a representative sample.