Managers’ Motivating Language and employees’ Job Engagement: The Role of Meaningfulness and Employee– Manager Relationships

ABSTRACTManagers’ communication, relationships with subordinates, and employees’ feelings of meaningful work are vital in engaging subordinates. However, their relationships lack a theoretical foundation. Drawing on self-concept theory (SCT), this study assesses the mediating role of psychological meaningfulness and employee – manager relationships (EMR) in the connection between three types of motivating language used by managers and job engagement. This study also tests the moderating role of EMR between psychological meaningfulness and job engagement. A convenience sampling method was used to collect 380 responses from employees working at four- and five-star hotels in Malaysia. Data were analyzed using the partial least squares method. Although three forms of motivating language positively relate to psychological meaningfulness, only empathetic language positively relates to EMR. Psychological meaningfulness mediates relationship between the three forms of motivating language and job engagement, while EMR only mediates the relationship between empathetic language and job engagement. EMR also significantly and negatively moderates the link between psychological meaningfulness and job engagement. These findings add value to the SCT and motivating language by assessing the relationships between motivating language, EMR, psychological meaningfulness, and job engagement. Managers can use motivating language to make jobs meaningful and build relationships with subordinates to improve employee outcomes.KEYWORDS: Motivating languagepsychological meaningfulnessjob engagementemployee–manager relationshipsself-concept theory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1528008X.2023.2270617