Is it me or us? The impact of individual and collective participation on work engagement and burnout in a cluster-randomized organisational intervention

Abstract

Participation is generally recommended when implementing organisational interventions, however, understanding how participation works remains understudied. In a cluster- randomised, controlled intervention employing a wait-list control design, we explore whether perceptions of individual or collective participation had the greatest impact on a participatory organisational intervention’s outcomes; work engagement and burnout. We conducted the study in the Danish postal service (N=330). Using multi-level analyses, we found that perceptions of individual participation predicted improvements in work engagement and reductions in burnout post-intervention, however, these relationships became non- significant after including perceptions of being part of a collective participatory process in the model. Our findings add to the understanding of the role participation and in particular, perceptions of a collective participatory intervention process, plays in ensuring interventions achieve their intended outcomes.