Abstract

This work is part of the studies on compensation policies. The objective is to study the link between employee work engagement and total reward systems. The context of the analysis is that of employees in people care organizations in people care organizations. The literature shows that such workers are driven mainly by reasons of intrinsic nature (Leete, 2000). However, the intrinsic meaning of the work is for all workers, not just for those of the non-profit, an aspect that is given more and more attention than ever before. This work, therefore, arises as of great interest in the current overall perspective. In fact, the opportunity to use consistently and effectively relatively inexpensive instruments, such as relational returns, for workers who pay increasing attention to the intrinsic meaning of work, represents a viable perspective both for non-profit and for-profit organizations. Starting from the major theoretical contributions on the themes of work engagement and total rewards, the articleconsiders the specific context of the social cooperation. The analysis is performed with a sample of employees (N = 153) working in the people care sector (elderly care, child care, handicapped care) in five organizations in social and education services in Tuscany. The regression analysis results show the criticality of the relational aspects of the reward and the importance of the pay administration with respect to the work engagement in the workplace. At the same time, the analysis does not reveal a significant contribution of other aspects of financial rewards in relation to work engagement.