UWES Utrecht Work Engagement Scale Preliminarty Manual

Abstract

Contrary to what its name suggests, Occupational Health Psychology has almost exclusive been concerned with ill-health and unwell-being. For instance, a simple count reveals that about 95% of all articles that have been published so far in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology deals with negative aspects of workers' health and well-being , such as cardiovascular disease, Repetitive Strain Injury, and burnout. In contrast, only about 5% of the articles deals with positive aspects such as job satisfaction and motivation. This rather one-sided negative focus is by no means specific for the field of occupational health psychology. According to a recent estimate, the amount of psychological articles on negative states outnumbers the amount of positive articles by 17 to 11. However, it seems that times have changed. Since the beginning of this century, more attention is paid to what has been coined positive psychology: the scientific study of human strength and optimal functioning. This approach is considered to supplement the traditional focus of psychology on psychopathology, disease, illness, disturbance, and malfunctioning. The recent trend to concentrate on optimal functional also aroused attention in organizational psychology, as is demonstrated by a recent plea for positive organizational behavior; that is ‘...the study of positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement in today’s workplace’ 2. Because of the emergence of positive (organizational) psychology, it is not surprising that positive aspects of health and well-being are increasingly popular in Occupational Health Psychology. One of these positive aspects is work engagement, which is considered to be the antipode of burnout. Whilst burned-out workers feel exhausted and cynical, their engaged counterparts feel vigorous and enthusiastic about their work. In contrast to previous positive approaches – such as the humanistic psychology – who were largely unempirical, the current positive psychology is empirical in nature. This implies the careful operationalization of constructs, including work engagement. Hence, we wrote this test-manual of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES). This test manual is preliminary, which means that our work on the UWES is still in progress. Nevertheless, we did not want to wait any longer with publishing some important psychometric details since many colleagues, both in The Netherlands as well as abroad, are working with the UWES. Many of them have contributed to this preliminary test-manual by proving us with their data. Without their help this manual could not have been written. Therefore, we would like to thank our colleagues for their gesture of true scientific collaboration3.