Business Employees/Individual Contributors/Members/Adults
OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to gauge the level of employee engagement amongst a sample of CCRs in South Africa and to track the paths through which salient antecedents affect this engagement. METHODOLOGY Call centres located across South Africa were approached to participate in this study. Of the 14 call centres that were approached, seven consented (three in Cape Town, three in Pretoria and one in Johannesburg). Respondents (N = 215) completed the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003), the Team Diagnostic Survey (Wageman, Hackman & Lehman, 2005), the Orientation to Life Questionnaire (Antonovsky, 1987), and the Leadership Practices Inventory. Internal reliability coefficients for the LPI in this study were .93 Model, .94 Inspire, .92 Challenge, .89 Enable, and .93 Encourage. Confirmatory factor analysis was done each leadership practice scale with LISREL 8.0. The author reported that “an investigation of the RMSEA of the subscales showed that they were acceptable (p. 82)…for the p-value for close fit, a “good fit was indicated” (p. 83), and for both the goodness of fit index (GFI) and adjusted goodness of fit index, all scales “represented a good fit” (p. 83). A “leadership effectiveness” scale was created as the sum of responses to the five leadership practice subscales.
KEY FINDINGS Leadership effectiveness was not found to have a significant positive influence on work engagement in call centres, although it did have a significant positive influence on the effectiveness of teams.