Work engagement as a positive, fulfilling, and affective-motivational state of occupa-tional well-being is currently one of the most popular outcomes in occupational health psy-chology. In the last decade, there has been a considerable amount of research on the con-cept. For instance, a quick search in Google Scholar (December 2019) reveals almost 80.000 hits for »work engagement«. Researchers’ and practitioners’ interest in work engagement is understandable given its association with better health and performance. Despite the grow-ing number of articles on the topic, there are still blind spots that need to be addressed. Hence, I was interested in bringing some more clarity to the concept. Specifically, I aimed to get detailed insights into the job-related antecedents and outcomes of work engagement, and its applicability in specific occupational and non-occupational contexts. To tackle these aims, I realized two meta-analytic reviews, where I used the innova-tive meta-analytic structural equation modeling (metaSEM) approach. This approach is still very uncommon in psychological research, especially on occupational health psychology topics. However, metaSEM makes it possible to integrate data from all available studies into one meta-analytic structural model, and to test this model even if it had not been tested in the primary studies. Furthermore, I used data from a health monitoring program at a large urban police department, and from a health monitoring program at a large German univer-sity. Since I conducted the studies in collaboration with my colleagues, I will use the terms we and our when presenting results and implications. We were able to validate the essential assumptions of the job demands-resources (JD-R) framework, which was the first theoretical model that introduced work engagement con-ceptually: job resources lead to work engagement even in the long run, whereas job de-mands do not have a substantial impact on work engagement. The JD-R framework has the crucial advantage over other occupational frameworks that it allows for both salutogenic and pathogenic effects of job characteristics on occupational well-being. Based on our re-search, we concluded, that the JD-R framework is an excellent theoretical basis to examine work engagement in a broad range of organizations and occupational fields. We were also interested to find out which job resources are most important for work engagement and why some job resources might be more significant than others for facili-tating work engagement. Hence, we investigated which job resources would be the key drivers of work engagement in various occupational settings. We differentiated job re-sources in organizational-level, group-level, and leader-level resources and concluded that organizational-level resources (e.g. autonomy) are the most important predictors for work engagement. This provides clarity on where interventions to enhance occupational well-being should start. Although interventions at any of the three levels are promising, organi-zations are well-advised to predominantly strengthen resources at the organizational level to increase employees’ work engagement. With this in mind, we aimed to broaden the theoretical and contextual application of work engagement. Hence, we integrated work engagement as a positive, salutogenic out-come into the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model. Since the ERI model was originally de-signed to identify health complaints and their job-related antecedents, the integration of work engagement broadens the applicability of this model. We found that an imbalance between effort and reward is associated with reduced work engagement. However, especial-ly the reward dimensions esteem and security foster work engagement within the police context. Hence, we gained insights into which specific factors within the ERI model are most important for work engagement. Furthermore – since work engagement is associated with various positive health- and performance-related outcomes – we applied the concept and its operationalization to the context of university students. We examined the psychometric structure of a short (9 items) and an ultra-short (3 items) measure of student engagement with the Utrecht Work En-gagement Scale – Student Form (UWES-SF), and its relations to other pathogenic and salutogenic health indicators. We confirmed the three-factor structure of the German UWES-9-SF and the one-factor structure of the UWES-3-SF. Both measures appear to be reliable and valid indicators of student engagement that can be used as an alternative to Schaufeli’s original version, the UWES-SF. Due to its brevity, the UWES-3-SF is most appro-priate to capture student engagement in national and epidemiological surveys. Taken together, my research sharpens the understanding of work engagement as a theoretical concept and its applicability in various occupational and non-occupational con-texts. I firmly believe that work engagement – defined as a positive, fulfilling state – is one of the most beneficial states of well-being for both employees and students.
