Integrating Play Into Work: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Building Work Engagement Through Play

<p>Evolving expectations of what work should look like among employees have inspired companies to revisit working conditions and find a balance between driving organizational outcomes and creating a positive work environment. Work engagement is a positive outcome for organizations and individuals (Bakker et al., 2020). However, interventions centered around driving engagement often are isolated programs that remove individuals from their typical work experience. Integrating play into work offers a strategy to develop employee resources, assisting in actualizing organizational goals and cultivating a positive workplace culture through enhancing work engagement. In this mixed methods dissertation, which involves interviews with leaders (Study 1) and employee surveys (Study 2), I examine perceptions, benefits, and implementation strategies of integrating play into work from top-down and bottom-up perspectives. In Study 1, I interviewed organizational leaders (n = 16) to understand how play is perceived and implemented in a top-down manner at the leader and organizational levels. Using a thematic analysis, emerging themes of authenticity, managerial support, and work engagement added to the current understanding of play at work. In a bottom-up approach in Study 2, I surveyed 248 employees from Prolific to conduct a cross-sectional analysis testing the empirical relationship between an attitude of play with work engagement and two potential mediators, personal and social resources. Participants also responded to qualitative questions from the Study 1 leader interview protocol, which were compared through content analysis to determine differences between leaders' and employees' perceptions of play at work. Structural equation modeling indicated that a playful attitude significantly and positively predicts the level of engagement at work as well as personal and social resources. However, personal and social resources did not mediate the relationship between a playful attitude and work engagement when control variables were considered. Short answer responses from employees shared similarities to leader responses, particularly in identifying benefits of play at work and the prevalence of gamification as a form of play. Employees' perception of detriments to play were overall more pronounced than leaders, indicating power differential may be a factor in perception of play at work. The combined results from Study 1 and Study 2 provides an overview of how play is perceived by leaders and organizations (top-down) and how play is experienced and perceived by employees (bottom-up). Findings contribute to the theoretical development of play at work by including Conservation of Resource Theory (COR) as an explanatory mechanism for how play can produce both positive and negative results. Play was also identified by both leaders and employees as positively contributing to a sense of engagement at work, providing triangulating evidence that play improves work engagement. From a practical implication’s perspective, findings offer suggestions for how to avoid detriments and maximize benefits through considering contextual factors at work, creating psychological safety prior to installing an intervention, and obtaining managerial support.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Psychology, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• Hamilton, Jordan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Becky Reichard
• Stewart I. Donaldson
• Yuri Scharp

• Conservation of Resource Theory
• Personal resources
• Play at work
• Social reources
• Work engagement
• Psychology

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/949

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1971