INCONSISTENTLY ENGAGING AT WORK? INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG ENGAGEMENT VARIABILITY, EMOTIONAL STABILITY, AND PERFORMANCE

Scholars have made considerable headway in outlining the relationships among engagement and critical organizational outcomes. Of note, a burgeoning line of work has shown that job engagement uniquely predicts job performance: Those who are highly engaged also perform well on the job. Although average engagement is an important predictor of performance, we suggest that our understanding of the relationship between engagement and performance remains incomplete without attending to the inconsistency with which individuals engage, i.e., their engagement variability. We hypothesize that those employees high in engagement variability should exhibit lower performance because they inefficiently apply their resources, independent of their average engagement. Furthermore, we predict that this relationship is stronger for employees who are less equipped to manage inefficiencies emanating from engagement variability: those high in emotional stability. We find support for our hypotheses in a ten-time-period study of 161 cadets across three branches of the Reserve Officer Training Corps.