Which of the following is not an organizational constraint?

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Highlights

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Organizational Constraints (OC) form 3 types: social, structural and infrastructural.

Perceptions of OC types differ among teammates, affecting work engagement (WE).

WE is greater when an employee agrees with the teammates about levels of social OC.

WE is worse when an employee rates social and structural OC higher than the teammates.

The negative effects of OC are exacerbated by perceptual incongruence within a team.

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.

Keywords

Organizational constraints

Work engagement

Polynomial regression

Perceptual congruence

Shared reality

Cristian Coo is an associate researcher at Universitat Jaume I, Spain. His research focuses on design and evaluation of interventions aimed at improving psychosocial wellbeing, work engagement, and performance in organizations.

Anne Richter is associate professor at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Her research focuses on on understanding organizational change on different levels. More specifically, in understanding the implementation and change processes and particularly leadership that can facilitate these processes.

Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz is an associate professor at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Her research focuses on improvement in organizations with a special interest in organizational level interventions to improve employee health.

Henna Hasson is an associate professor at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and head of the Unit for Implementation at the Centrum for Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the Stockholm County Council, Sweden. Her research focus on the implementation of occupational health interventions.

Marta Roczniewska is a researcher at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and assistant professor at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland. Her research focuses on workplace factors that lead to sustainable organizational interventions and employment sustainability.

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.