Can Teal Practices Increase Employees' Work Engagement?

Abstract

Because engaged employees work with passion, in deep connection with their company and are innovative, they may drive their organization's performance. Teal organizations, which implement original and inspiring ways of working, appear particularly favourable to create and support engagement in the long run. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study engagement drivers and barriers among many organizational dimensions, and secondly to characterize Teal Organization through their practices. We also hypothesize that Teal practices may drive employees' engagement. To this aim, we built a questionnaire and performed a cross-industry survey in France. The survey included a standardized measure of engagement, an assessment of organizational structure, management, leadership styles and social climate based on scholarly literature, and a series of questions dealing with Teal practices that we designed. The sample was composed of 767 respondents on behalf of their company. Using multiple regression analysis, we observe that engagement is predicted by social openness of the company and by organizational trust. Teal practices aggregate in a statistically reliable manner into a construct that we call Teal index. If Teal index is not a direct predictor of engagement, it appears to contribute to predicting trust, which itself predicts engagement. These results are insightful in many ways: they highlight trust as a key factor of engagement, offer a first overview of the adoption of Teal practices among French companies and open up avenues for capturing Teal philosophy beyond observable and measurable practices in everyday corporate life. These findings are discussed with an evolutionary viewpoint to better understand current and future transformation of organizations.