Can We Have Fun at Work and Still Be Competent and Engaged? Multilevel Pathways from Playful Climate to Work Engagement

Abstract This study investigated the environmental antecedents and daily consequences of playful work design (PWD), a proactive strategy that employees use to enhance their engagement in daily work tasks. Grounded in the Job Demands-Resources theory, we present a robust process model, testing playful organizational climate (job resource) and PWD (bottom-up behavioral strategy) as predictors of daily engagement, mediated by the satisfaction of the need for competence. Our research involved 209 employees from diverse occupational settings who completed daily questionnaires over 12 consecutive working days. After a series of multilevel confirmatory factor analyses (MCFA) to establish multilevel construct validity, we constructed a 2–1-1–1 multilevel structural equation model (MSEM), incorporating all hypothesized paths. The data partially supported our hypotheses. At the employee level, it was found that a playful organizational climate did not directly predict engagement but indirectly through the behavioral enactment of playful work design. Furthermore, a playful climate did not transfer its effects through the satisfaction of the need for competence. This effect occurred only when PWD was also included as a mediator, underscoring the vital role of employees’ concrete behavioral strategies in linking organizational climate to engagement. At the within-person level, it was observed that on days when employees infused their work with more playfulness and competition, they reported feeling more competent and engaged as a result.