ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Organ. Psychol.
Sec. Employee Well-being and Health
You do not have to become self-employed to feel engaged Comparing self-determination, meaning, and engagement in self-employed and employed workers
Provisionally accepted
- 1Stockholm universitet Psykologiska institutionen, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Karolinska Institutet Institutionen for larande informatik management och etik, Stockholm, Sweden
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Work engagement likely stems from autonomy-competens 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.
Keywords: autonomy, competence, Meaningful work, engagement, multilevel modeling, BSEM, Day reconstruction method
Received: 15 Aug 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bergman, Bernhard-Oettel and Bujacz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Louise Elisabeth Bergman
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