From health-related Corporate Welfare initiatives to Employee Engagement: unveiling the role of Employee Legitimization

The present study aims at unveiling the determinants of the process which leads an employee to legitimize a health-related Corporate Welfare (CW) initiative, thus increasing his or her work engagement. The work is based on 276 answers coming from a survey to test the proposed model. The results obtained demonstrate that different sets of health-related CW initiatives favor employee engagement if they meet the legitimization of the employees. Thus, employers willing to promote initiatives of CW targeting the health of their employees should adopt an employee-centric approach that considers their perceptions and interests, as such factors significantly affect the success of the initiatives themselves. Overall, the results sustain the high potentiality of these kinds of initiatives given the great commitment people show towards health and the positive opinion they have about CW, especially in the light of the impact of the Covid- 19 pandemic.