Physical and psychological health relations to engagement and vigor at work: A prismacompliant systematic review

Abstract

Positive occupational health psychology emphasizes the need to analyze variables that promote workers’ health. From this perspective, work engagement is a positive emotional-motivational state in employees, and vigor at work is a positive affective response to continuous interactions among different elements of the work environment. Despite the relation of both constructs to health implications, the ways in which they are related to different health categories (psychological health, psychological disorder symptoms, physical health, health-related behavior and overall health) may vary. Given that they are different constructs, they could affect health in different ways. Thus, we undertake a PRISMA-compliance systematic review to analyze the possible differing impact of work engagement and vigor at work on workers’ health. The search, drawn from four electronic databases, was refined and 70 papers on work engagement and 9 papers on vigor at work were finally analyzed. The results show that both constructs are relevant in health, implying improvements in all categories, except for the psychological disorder symptom in which no vigor studies were found. However, the influence of both constructs is different. Specifically, vigor at work has greater involvement in physical health, leading to lower high-sensitivity C-reactive protein levels, fibrinogen levels, hyperlipidemia risk, diabetes mortality risk and physical symptoms, as well as health-related behavior, leading to less insomnia, more physical activity and more physical exercise. Work engagement is mostly related to psychological health, leading to improved well-being and life satisfaction as well as a lower risk of suffering from stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue and psychological tension.