Employee Engagement

A Research Overview

Brad Shuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138490604
• eBook ISBN: 9781351035040
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

The field of employee engagement has experienced unprecedented growth over the last three decades. Despite remarkable progress in both practice and scholarship, there remains tremendous confusion about what employee engagement is, what it means, and how organizations can take proactive steps to harness the full power of an engaged workforce.

This short-form book provides readers a unique and research-based road map through the rapidly evolving research around employee engagement, including the identification of key literature and theory along with expert, timesaving connections to how theory has informed practice. The author covers the various disciplinary approaches and schools of thought, thematically bridging scholarly literature – including and identifying the historically significant and most current – to better understand how the research is evolving and what new opportunities for scholarship are emerging.

Essential reading for scholars of human resource management, leadership and management more broadly, the book is also a valuable read for reflective practitioners globally.

1
The case for employee engagement

In 1990, William Kahn published his now seminal work on personal engagement and disengagement, igniting decades of research and practice – all to harness and better understand this idea of employee engagement. Post 1990, research on engagement has developed into a field of dedicated and growing study in multiple areas of practice. Employee engagement has clearly captivated the attention of scholars and practitioners across the globe. A sure sign of this growth and attention has been the burgeoning of research over just the last decade, including a global boom of research focused toward understanding the application, theory development, and measurement of employee engagement. After making its official debut in 1990, the field of engagement has matured to include multiple perspectives, frameworks of measurement, and at times, competing theoretical models.

Despite remarkable progress across varying streams of intersecting literature bases, there remains tremendous confusion about what employee engagement is, what it means in both research and practice, and how organizations can take proactive steps to harness the full power of a fully engaged workforce. From an academic standpoint, voluminous research dots the landscape, yet most streams of literature remain disjointed and fragmented. From a practice standpoint, few leaders understand employee engagement in a way that is actionable. Notwithstanding this problem, there is, however, a growing clarity about engagement-linked states and distinctions between ideas, particularly the positionality of employee engagement (Shuck et al., 2016b; Saks and Gruman, 2014). This book provides a brief overview of that development and chronicles the construct historically, offering a structure for cataloguing the field’s growth as well as providing an overview of the multiple facets that make up the present state of employee engagement theory and research today. Along the way, this book is built on an anthology of important works by identifying the seminal and most emergent work in the field, as a way to streamline and make meaning of the literature for interested readers and practitioners who want to know more about employee engagement.

Perhaps surprising, despite decades of research, employee engagement remains a contentious and at times controversial topic. Researchers have questioned if employee engagement is redundant with job satisfaction and other like job attitudes (Newman and Harrison, 2008; Newman et al., 2011), if engagement can be measured accurately (Keenoy, 2013), and whether or not engagement is just another stream of corporate propaganda designed to exploit employees to get them to work harder for the sake of profitability (Guest, 2014). These are all questions that should be critically examined, and this unique book is an endeavor to overview the breadth of employee engagement research and the new ideas emerging across the globe, including tackling these challenging questions head-on.

Despite critical inquiry, as a phenomenon, there is no denying that employee engagement has been a significantly trending topic in both the management and human resource fields for decades. According to the most recent Google Scholar trends, the topic of employee engagement is as popular as it has ever been. See Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 represents a Google Trend line tracking the total level of search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for a given length of time – in this case, 2004 to early 2019. A value of 100 represents the peak of popularity for the term across time. The Google Trend score for employee engagement is 99. Interest in employee engagement has never been higher. For comparison, when juxtaposed alongside the search terms work engagement and job engagement, two very popular and often synonymously used terminologies, the fervor of interest in employee engagement is quite clear. See Figure 1.2 for a comparison. It’s not even close. The idea of employee engagement is enormously popular, and all signs point toward increasing significance worldwide.

It seems everyone wants more employee engagement, yet little research is able to precisely articulate how the experience develops in practice. Awareness remains high, but our understanding remains decidedly low. More, in recent years, a myth that global engagement is on the decline has circulated (Scott, 2017). Even Gallup’s own State of the American Work-force has highlighted stagnant levels of engagement since early 2010. This is a seemingly significant problem. How is it that scholars have researched employee engagement for decades, dissected nearly every angle of the construct, looked at outcomes as well as catalogued antecedents and drivers, and still engagement levels remain stagnant almost 20 years running? Perhaps we are missing something in the engagement dilemma. This issue must be addressed.

This dilemma raises questions about the present state of the employee engagement field and its future trajectory. While employee engagement has developed into a multi-streamed conversation, there remain debates

Figure 1.1 Level of interest in the search term employee engagement

Figure 1.2 Level of interest in the search terms employee engagement, work engagement, and job engagement

and disagreement about how best to frame and represent what we mean as scholars when we say employee engagement (Saks and Gruman, 2014). For example, how is employee engagement best positioned, how can we make sense of the inter-connected conversations that scholars are having, what does the history of employee engagement tell us about its future, and how does this domain of scholarship best fit within the human resource and management literature moving forward? More, how do we make sense that despite voluminous records of research, we know very little about what employee engagement actually is all the while global consultancies (c.f., Hewitt, 2015) continue suggesting that employee engagement is either stagnant or on a steep decline?

As the field of employee engagement develops, scholars and practitioners should take stock in the historical landscape and then look to the future – and connect the two with intentionality. Traditionally speaking, and in contrast to other like constructs, the field of research that encapsulates employee engagement is relatively young and perhaps just starting to peak. Considering that research on similar variables such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment date back several decades, employee engagement is a new, still emerging idea. Yet, employee engagement – as an idea – seems to have the potential to impact some of our greatest challenges in the workplace, and the research has been clear on the influence of engagement toward critical business outcomes (Harter et al., 2002; Harter et al., 2010; Xanthopoulou et al., 2009). If this is at all true – that employee engagement has the potential to impact practice in real ways – how then, will employee engagement influence the emerging landscape of organizations over the next millennia, and how will work and the working context be shaped over time through this lens?

To better explore these questions, the remainder of this book comprises five chapters. Chapter 2 offers a history of definitions and speaks directly to what the research says employee engagement is and what it is not, wading through the building wave of scholarship published over the past three decades. Chapter 3 highlights the expression of employee engagement and speaks to the makeup of engagement from a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral framework. Chapter 4 considers emerging trends and the future of the field, particularly as it relates to measurement. Chapter 5 discusses the documented impact of engagement from an organizational, individual, and health and wellness perspective, linking the state of employee engagement to important and critical societal factors including burnout. Finally, Chapter 6 puts closure on this conversation by highlighting emerging areas of development, the reality of disengagement, and offering brief closing remarks on the individual state of employee engagement.

I should point out that you do not need to read this book in progressive order. Each chapter can be read individually and out of order without losing too much significance. Cover to cover. Ala carte. Buffet-style. However you prefer. My hope is that you read this book in a way that is helpful and significant to you. If you are a practitioner and want more information about how to measure engagement, Chapter 4 would be a great starting point. If you are a scholar looking for grounded theoretical frameworks on employee engagement for a paper you are writing, you might consider starting at Chapter 3 and then going back for more detail in Chapters 2 and 5. If you are a student of employee engagement, I hope you might read every word cover to cover. However you use this book, I hope that it is helpful and thought-provoking.

As a final note, this book is limited by what I know, what could be found, as well as my own personal perspective and connection to the theory. To be sure, this book takes a decidedly psychological perspective to understanding employee engagement. There are, of course, other frames of reference – economic, political, historical, etc. – but this book accounts for the human being in the natural working environment. I do not pretend to have read everything about employee engagement and included it here, to know all of the nuances, or even to be able to divorce myself from my own sense of reality when it comes my own experiences of engagement. Rather, I believe these chapters provide the groundwork for understanding the structure, discourse, and future of the employee engagement field, all grounded in the existing literature. Interested readers should consult root citations, read the original articles for more detail, and critically explore the story being told.

I hope you are inspired. And more, I hope you remain engaged.

2
What exactly is employee engagement?

There are many documented, well-cited sources of existing research on employee engagement. They include seminal (Kahn, 1990; Saks, 2006; Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli et al., 2002; Schaufeli et al., 2006; Shuck, Rocco, & Albornoz, 2011b; Shuck and Wollard, 2010) and current scholarly articles (Shuck et al., 2016a; Shuck et al., 2016b; Potgieter, 2016; Shuck et al., 2017a; Bailey et al., 201 7; Saks and Gruman, 2014; Purcell, 2014; Valentin, 2014; Kahn and Heaphy, 2014; Briner, 2014; O’Boyle et al., 2012; Cole et al., 2012) as well as edited volumes (Albrecht, 2010; Truss et al., 2013a), practitioner white papers (Wildermuth, 2008; Hewitt, 2015), and books (Wagner, 2015; Kelleher, 2013). This chapter will focus on the meaning of employee engagement and the historical development of its definition through a review of connected literature – including many of those cited above – and will offer a glimpse into the etymology of employee engagement through a specific and research grounded definition.

Notwithstanding the many documented sources of existing literature, the interested reader would be hard pressed to find two different authors who used the same definition, positionality, or even meaning. As a result, the meaning of engagement has remained unapologetically disconnected throughout its existence. Scholars have routinely applied varying definitions, frameworks, and terms meant to bring clarity, but unfortunately, their use has resulted in misunderstanding. This has been, in review of the historical development of the engagement construct, out of a good faith effort to bring the construct forward, yet, misunderstanding remains. Throughout this chapter, the dominant perspectives of employee engagement are detailed and then juxtaposed alongside like constructs such as job engagement and work engagement, as well more emergent constructs such as collective engagement, social intellectual engagement, and organizational engagement. A variety of definitions are provided throughout this chapter to be clear about what is meant when terms are used in both research and practice. As a tool to provide a streamlined perspective of the varying definitions in one central place, Table 2.1 provides an overview of the terms used throughout the chapter including the engagement-type name, the root citation of the original work, and a specific definition, quoted di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Keywords
• 1 The case for employee engagement
• 2 What exactly is employee engagement?
• 3 The expression of employee engagement
• 4 Emerging developments in employee engagement research
• 5 The impact of employee engagement
• 6 Final reflections on employee engagement
• References
• Index