TDNet Discover

The purpose of this longitudinal quantitative study was to test the relationship between employee work engagement and employees' perception of workplace safety. This study focused on Washington State natural resource agencies from 2020-2022, and aimed to answer the question, what is the correlation between perceived physical safety and employee engagement in Washington State natural resource agencies, and tested the relationship while controlling for job satisfaction. Kahn’s theory of personal engagement, Maslow’s theory of human motivation, and social exchange theory served as the theoretical framework to understand how employees’ perception of physical safety within an organization is linked to employee engagement as a motivational construct. The Washington State annual employee engagement survey and statewide safety survey were used to collect secondary data. A principal component analysis identified the primary factors from each instrument to measure the variables and covariate. A Shapiro-Wilk test indicated the data were not normally distributed with a p-value < 0.001 for each variable. Kendall’s tau b suggested a correlation of -0.229 existed but was not significate with a p-value of 0.118. However, distance correlation did indicate a significant correlation of 0.505 between employee engagement and perceived physical safety with a p-value of 0.015. Spearman’s partial correlation found when controlling for the influence of job satisfaction, employee engagement and perceived physical safety exhibited a correlation of -0.412 but was insignificant with a confidence interval of 0.057, indicating an underlying variable. Kendall’s tau b and Spearman’s rho also revealed a significant positive relationship between employee engagement and job satisfaction. Further researcher on this topic should include primary data collection using pre-tested instruments while also accounting for variations in demographics, specifically age and employment tenure.