Examining the empirical relationship between subjective fatigue and employee work engagement in a heavy workload manufacturing environment

The purpose of this study was to examine the empirical relationship between Subjective Fatigue and Employee work engagement among employees working under heavy workload conditions in Tennessee, USA. The questionnaire was developed by reviewing extant literature and the factors that were chosen were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Post elimination of the weakly loaded factors, a questionnaire based on the selected factors was designed to measure the subjective levels of fatigue. The data was collected from two manufacturing company sites from East Tennessee and was subjected to analysis using IBM SPSS and SmartPLS softwares. As a part of the SEM analysis, a causal model was built to determine the existence of the relationship between subjective fatigue and employee work engagement. The model aimed at determining whether a correlation and causality were present between the two constructs. The results suggested that a correlation between subjective fatigue and employee engagement does exist, but a unidirectional causality between the two does not. In other words, high levels of subjective fatigue do not directly impact the engagement levels of employees.