Federal Employee Engagement and Pay Perceptions: Testing Bakker et al.’s Prediction

Employee engagement has emerged as a critical area of interest within public management. Scholars recently proposed that engagement may exhibit a curvilinear relationship with positive outcomes. Previous research posits that greater effort on the job increases employees’ appreciation for pay equity, which, in the public sector, is defined by three components: equal pay for equal work, market-based pay, and performance-based pay. Using Merit Principles Survey data, this study finds that as employees become more engaged, their perceived importance of these three components remains relatively unchanged or even declines—until a certain threshold of engagement is reached. Beyond this point, the perceived importance of pay equity increases significantly. These findings offer an empirical response to Bakker et al.’s call for research on nonlinear engagement effects and refine the conventional view that greater effort is consistently associated with stronger concerns for pay equity.