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Introduction
The study of work engagement has gained significant attention in the last few years particularly with studies showing its relevance for corporate performance. These studies seem indeed to indicate that engaged employees are more committed to their organization (Hakanen et al., 2006) and perform better at work (Bakker and Bal, 2010; Xanthopoulou et al., 2009). At the same time work engagement seems to lead to higher levels of psychological soundness and overall well-being (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004; Schaufeli et al., 2008; Xanthopoulou et al., 2009; Demerouti et al., 2001). Often seen as the antipode of burnout (Maslach et al., 2001), work engagement seems to lead to obvious professional and social benefits. Schaufeli and Bakker (2004, 2010) defined engagement as a positive and fulfilling work-related state of mind which is characterized by behaviors of vigor, dedication and absorption. Interestingly, Bakker and Demerouti (2007) proposed that engagement at the individual level is driven mainly by available job resources (support, autonomy, feedback, etc.) and personal resources (resilience, self-efficacy, optimism, etc.), while being negatively influenced by the level of job demands (work pressure, emotional, mental and physical demands), however no explicit mention is made of leadership as a potential resource.
Despite the apparent lack of studies in this area, there is some recent empirical evidence on the positive relationship between leadership and engagement, most notably with transformational leadership (Zhu et al., 2009), empowering leadership (Tuckey et al., 2012) and servant leadership (van Dierendonck, 2011; van Dierendonck et al., 2013). In spite of these developments the specific contexts and mechanisms through which different types of leadership affect engagement are still unclear, forming the main motivation of our study.
In this paper, we focus on an external context of high uncertainty that may be paradigmatic for the potential detrimental effect of job demands on engagement. In specific, our study is focussed on two organizations from the financial sector in the middle of a merger process, with large layoffs being conducted while aligning strategies between two fundamentally different business models and cultures. Such context can be seen as representative of a typical discontinuous change event of the punctuated equilibrium model of Tushman et al. (1985). Given the recent findings of van Dierendonck