Work Values and Work Engagement Within Teams: The Mediating Role of Need Satisfaction

Building on self-determination theory, we examined the relationship between shared work values and work engagement within teams. Specifically, we expected that employees would show higher levels of work engagement when working in teams characterized by intrinsic relative to extrinsic work values, and that this relationship can be explained by basic psychological need satisfaction. Multilevel analyses using data from 307 employees taken from 31 teams working in a variety of sectors in Belgium and the Netherlands largely supported the hypotheses: Individual-level need satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between team-level work values and individual-level engagement. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.