You do not have to become self-employed to feel engaged – Comparing self-determination, meaning, and engagement in self-employed and employed workers

Work engagement likely stems from autonomy-competence satisfaction and experiences of meaningful work. Such experiences vary not only from person to person, but also from task to task over the course of a workday. In this study, a sample of 175 self-employed and employed workers reported their autonomy-competence satisfaction, meaningful work, and work engagement—a positive, fulfilling, affective-motivational state of wellbeing—for a total of 560 tasks during a workday using the Day Reconstruction Method. We applied Bayesian multilevel modeling to disentangle the person and task effects. On person level, both autonomy-competence satisfaction and meaning elicited higher levels of engagement, but on task level, only autonomy-competence satisfaction was related to engagement. Moreover, autonomy-competence satisfaction and meaning appeared more important to engagement than the employment type. These findings may inform both organisations and self-employed workers on how to design work tasks to elevate engagement throughout the workday.