Given its positive relationship with valued organizational outcomes, worker-related engagement has become a prominent issue for practitioners and for scholars. While recent research has begun to validate various engagement antecedents and outcomes, little is known about the effects that work orientation and supportive leadership have on engagement, particularly among millennial workers, the soon to be dominant generational work group globally. To explore these gaps, we studied a particular form of work orientation – those indicating having a ‘calling’ – along with perceptions of how supportive leadership is for study subjects’ current work. Specifically, we posited positive worker engagement relationships for both worker calling and perceptions of leadership support, as well as for their interaction. Drawing upon a United States-based sample of 297 millennial workers, we found a positive relationship for each hypothesis. This study contributes to the expanding literature on the value of understanding how work orientation and leadership perceptions impact important organizational outcomes.

Sales performance is widely regarded as an important index of individual and organizational performance. Sales employees require access to organizational and job resources as well as personal resources in order to function effectively. An individual-level salesperson performance model is proposed that draws from the motivational process represented in the Job Demands-Resources Model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Organizational and job resources are conceptualized in terms of employee involvement climate (Riordan, Vandenberg, & Richardson, 2005). Personal resources are conceptualized in terms of employees' psychological capital (Luthans & Youssef, 2004). The model delineates how employee involvement climate influences engagement; how psychological capital influences performance; how employee involvement climate and psychological capital interact to influence employee engagement; and how, in turn, engagement impacts salesperson performance. The model will potentially prove useful to human resource managers, organizational development practitioners, and sales managers aiming to up-skill and more fully involve and engage their salespeople in order to optimize salesperson performance.