How job resources affect work engagement. A comparison between newcomers and long-stayers.

An increasing number of studies highlights the growing relevance of managing diversity in the workplace since it can represent both a great opportunity as well as a massive threat for organizations. Particular attention among scholars is devoted to the recognition of group diversity as a relevant organizational issue since it can have on the one side positive effects on organizational outcomes such as for example on innovation and, on the other side, it can favour negative aspects such as organizational conflicts. The important question of how to recognize the effort of different groups of employees (i.e. reward) is investigated here adopting as distinguishing criteria the ‘tenure cohort’ (Joshi et al 2011), that is: newcomers and long-stayers. The aim of the paper is to shed light on an issue of which relatively little is known of, that is the relationship between job resources and work engagement among different tenure groups at work. The analysis was carried out among a sample of 298 workers in 9 social cooperatives (SCs) in Italy. Among those 91 were considered as new-comers (less than two years in the organization) and 131 as long stayers (more than five years in the organization). Results show interesting differences between newcomers and long-stayers and could represent useful insights for the managers coping with tenure diversity issues in organizations.