EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in employee engagement. Many have claimed that employee engagement predicts employee outcomes, organizational success, and financial performance (e.g. total shareholder return) (Bates, 2004; Baumruk, 2004; Harter et al., 2002; Richman, 2006). At the same time, it has been reported that employee engagement is on the decline and there is a deepening disengagement among employees today (Bates, 2004; Richman, 2006). It has even been reported that the majority of workers today, roughly half of all Americans in the workforce, are not fully engaged or they are disengaged leading to what has been referred to as an “engagement gap” that is costing US businesses $300 billion a year in lost productivity (Bates, 2004; Johnson, 2004; Kowalski, 2003).

Unfortunately, much of what has been written about employee engagement comes from the practitioner literature and consulting firms. There is a surprising dearth of research on employee engagement in the academic literature (Robinson et al., 2004). The purpose of this study was to investigate the antecedents and consequences of two types of employee engagement: job and organization engagements. Previous research has focused primarily on engagement in one's job. However, there is evidence that one's degree of engagement depends on the role in question (Rothbard, 2001). Thus, it is possible that the antecedents and consequences of engagement depend on the type of engagement. In the next section, employee engagement is defined followed by a discussion of employee engagement models and theory and the study hypotheses.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has become a widely used and popular term (Robinson et al., 2004). However, most of what has been written about employee engagement can be found in practitioner journals where it has its basis in practice rather than theory and empirical research. As noted by Robinson et al. (2004), there has been surprisingly little academic and empirical research on a topic that has become so popular. As a result, employee engagement has the appearance of being somewhat faddish or what some might call, “old wine in a new bottle.”

To make matters worse, employee engagement has been defined in many different ways and the definitions and measures often sound like other better known and established constructs like organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior (Robinson et al., 2004). Most often it has been defined as emotional and intellectual commitment to the organization (Baumruk, 2004; Richman, 2006; Shaw, 2005) or the amount of discretionary effort exhibited by employees in their jobs (Frank et al., 2004).

In the academic literature, a number of definitions have been provided. Kahn (2000, p. 694) defines personal engagement as “the harnessing of organization members' selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.” Personal disengagement refers to “the uncoupling of selves from work roles; in disengagement, people withdraw and defend themselves physically, cognitively, or emotionally during role performances” (p. 694). Thus, according to Kahn (2000, 2002), engagement means to be psychologically present when occupying and performing an ...