Employers increasingly attempt to create the right environments where employees experience work–life balance. At the same time, organizations concerned with their organizational-level outcomes encourage improving employee work engagement. The question becomes, how do employee work–life balance and work engagement relate to one another? A similar question concerns human resource development (HRD) practitioners who seek to help both employees with balancing their work and life and employers with their organizational goals. A body of literature has examined the relationship between work–life balance and work engagement, which we review in this article. We identify and synthesize the findings of 37 articles empirically investigating the relationship between work–life balance and work engagement. The findings showed the various antecedents, mediators, and moderators that depict the relationships between work engagement and work–life balance. Furthermore, we provide insight into HRD scholarship regarding how to clarify the direction of causality between two concepts, which has been largely left inconclusive. Finally, our article proposes insightful directions for future research and practice in the field of HRD.

Despite the importance of the human/social dimension of organizational sustainability, this area of scholastic endeavor has received relatively little attention when compared to the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. On the basis of social exchange theory, this study posited the important role that employee work engagement is a key component for improving human performance for organizational sustainability. In order to do so, it suggests the important role that employee work engagement has on the relationships among various factors in the organization, including organizational procedural justice, knowledge sharing, and innovative work behaviors. A total of 400 complete responses from full-time employees in Korean organizations were used for the purpose of data analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM). The results demonstrated that organizational procedural justice is positively related with employee work engagement, knowledge sharing, and innovative work behavior. In addition, work engagement enhances employee knowledge sharing and innovative work behavior, and knowledge sharing enhances innovative work behavior. With regard to the mechanisms of these relationships, work engagement and knowledge sharing acted as significant mediators. Based on the findings, we suggested relevant research implications and recommendations for future research on sustainable organizations.

This study has two primary purposes: (1) examining the structural relationships between organizational support, job crafting, work engagement, and adaptive performance, and (2) identifying a revolving relationship derived from these relationships. To that end, the research sampled 250 human resources professionals in companies with at least 300 employees in South Korea and employed structural equation modeling. The study’s findings showed that organizational support affects adaptive performance through job crafting and work engagement. In addition, job crafting and adaptive performance mediated the relationship between organizational support and work engagement. Lastly, revolving relationships existed among job crafting, work engagement, and adaptive performance. Our findings make a positive contribution to comprehending the role of adaptive performance in motivating individuals further to craft their jobs creatively. Moreover, it advances our understanding of the complexities of the revolving relationships among job crafting, work engagement, and adaptive performance.

Work engagement is currently one of the most studied topics in organizational science. Moreover, from the various performance-based perspectives of human resource development (HRD), work engagement is closely tied to employees’ career. However, although research on work engagement and career has been conducted, more research is necessary to understand these concepts and investigate their relationship given their positive influences on organizations. More specifically, a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between work engagement and career that draws on the extant literature is both relevant to and beneficial for HRD professionals seeking to design and implement career-related strategies to enhance individual employees’ levels of work engagement. Thus, this study aims to examine the relationship between work engagement and career, ultimately synthesizing current studies into an integrated framework that describes the work engagement–career relationship and suggests future research agendas.

The issue of sustainability is a vital long-term goal for organizations and as such has formed the basis of much academic research over the last two decades. Organizational sustainability is defined as the ability for an organization to accomplish a range of economic, environmental, and human performance objectives. As one of the most studied topics in organizational science, employee engagement at work is seen as a critical component to achieving sustainable organizational success. In order to better understand the employee engagement discourse, this study examined the keywords that appear in the titles and abstract of the employee engagement research domain using the burst detection and social network analysis techniques. A total of 1406 employee engagement relevant articles that were published from 1990 to 2015 were included and investigated in the study. The results revealed the fading, emerging, and central themes within the employee engagement domain.

The current study aimed to scrutinize roles of work engagement as a mediator in the relationships between job and personal resources and employees’ outcomes, namely job performance and turnover intention, specifically focusing on testing the essentiality of work engagement. A total of 571 complete responses from full-time employees in Korean organizations were utilized for data analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM). This study analyzed two research models through the competing model approach: One model (Model 1) specified that job and personal resources directly influence job performance and turnover intention and also indirectly influence job performance and turnover intention through work engagement, whereas the other model (Model 2) specified that job and personal resources only indirectly influence turnover intention and job performance through work engagement. The results of the competing models demonstrated that overall, Model 2 adequately fit better than Model 1. The results also showed that the direct effects of job and personal resources on work engagement, as well as the direct effects of work engagement on job performance and turnover intention were statistically significant. In addition, the results of the study revealed statistically significant mediating effects of work engagement, not only on the relationship between job and personal resources and job performance, but also on the relationship between job and personal resources and turnover intention. Based on the results, theoretical and practical implications for human resource management, limitations, and recommendations for further research are discussed.