Can you buy work engagement? The relationship between pay, fringe benefits, financial bonuses and work engagement

Abstract

What role do financial rewards play as predictors of work engagement? To address this question, based on the Job Demands-Resources Theory (JD-R), the relationship between financial rewards and work engagement on a large sample (N = 1201) of multi-occupational employees was investigated. Through three steps of hierarchical regression, salary, fringe benefits, and bonuses were added to a JD-R model predicting work engagement via job resources and job demands; however, this did not lead to any significant improvement in model fit, and all new predictors were not significant. It may be concluded that financial rewards do not explain an additional amount of variance in work engagement over job demands and job resources. These results offer insights into the relationship between financial rewards and work engagement, and suggest that there is insufficient evidence to claim that pay, benefits, and bonuses are related to employee work engagement level.