Abstract/Summary

Employee engagement has attracted research interest as it is linked to improved performance and improved wellbeing. However, although most organisations are structured upon teams, the role of work teams in promoting employee engagement has often been overlooked. Likewise, employee engagement has received little attention in work teams literature. To address this research gap, this study draws on a multilevel perspective and work team literature and examines how team functional leadership and team interpersonal processes influence employee engagement at the team and individual levels. This multilevel study uses multisource cross-sectional data from 583 employees nested in 72 teams in an Indonesian supermarket chain and analyses the data using multilevel structural equation modelling. The team-level mediation analyses show that team interpersonal processes fully mediate the effect of team functional leadership on team work engagement, and team work engagement fully mediates the effect of team interpersonal processes on team performance. The cross-level mediation analyses demonstrate that team interpersonal processes and team functional leadership indirectly influence personal engagement through the mediational role of team work engagement. However, neither psychological meaningfulness, safety, nor availability is found to mediate the effect of team interpersonal processes on personal engagement. This study contributes to theory in several ways. First, it draws a further link between employee engagement and work teams literature by emphasising the significance of maintaining a high quality of team interpersonal processes in promoting team and individual engagement. Second, this study contributes to the team leadership literature by demonstrating how team leaders can enhance their team’s engagement by executing their leadership functions. Third, this multilevel study shed further light on the process of how engagement spread across the team members. The study contributes to practice by highlighting the importance of monitoring team interpersonal processes and team work engagement. It also underlines the benefit of partnering with the unit team leaders in promoting engagement within the organisation. This team-based approach can be particularly useful for job contexts that offer limited intrinsic rewards.