International Perspectives on Employee Engagement

Michael Segalla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000404241
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Employee engagement, or more specifically how to obtain more engagement and what to do with the disengaged, preoccupies C-level executives, human resources professionals, and consultants. Factiva, a global database of more than 33,000 national and international publications indexed by Dow Jones, registered a near-continuous double-digit growth in interest in the topic since 1994. COVID-19 appears to be straining work systems, and employee engagement may be suffering.

Interestingly, the American preoccupation with employee engagement, as evidenced by the tens of thousands press mentions indexed by Factiva and the over 38,000 website hits for the search term "employee engagement tools", does not appear shared by the rest of the world.

International Perspectives on Employee Engagement offers a predominately non-American view of employee engagement. The authors address employee engagement from a variety of perspectives. They represent both empirical research and theoretical discussions. The chapters have a distinctly international viewpoint with authors hailing from Europe, Middle East, Africa, and North America. Given the cultural diversity of the authors, this book offers a unique, non-American perspective on employee engagement.

With a new introduction that specifically examines the possible key performance indicators (KPIs) for the annual executive performance appraisal process resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Studies of Management & Organization.

International Perspectives on Employee Engagement: Are American Firms Leading the Way or Walking Alone?

Michael Segalla and Angelo DeNisi

Abstract: This article introduces four types of employee engagement, Active Employee Engagement, Unsatisfied Employee Engagement, No Employee Engagement, and Abusive Employee Engagement. These categories are derived from the diverse literature on employee engagement and through discussions with foreign human resource management scholars. One key assessment of the non-American focused academics is that employee engagement is principally a concern of American businesses. Foreign researchers focus more deeply on creating engagement in the workforce, work groups, and professions.

Employee engagement, or more specifically how to obtain more engagement and what to do with the disengaged, preoccupies C-level executives, human resources professionals, and consultants. Factiva, a global database of more than 33,000 national and international publications indexed by Dow Jones, registered a near continuous double-digit growth in interest in the topic since 1994. Articles mentioning employee engagement skyrocketed in 1998, perhaps due to the launch of Gallup’s Q12¹ employee engagement survey. To date, Factiva indexed over 67,000 mentions of employee engagement. Compare this figure with mentions workplace topics such as; workplace diversity (8,833), gender pay gap (42,701), pay for performance (49,950), or work/life balance (155,398), and it appears that this issue is important to America’s businesses. The reason may be linked to the attractive correlations between employee engagement levels and customer loyalty, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, absenteeism, shrinkage, patient safety incidents, and product defects. (Harter et al. 2016) It is unsurprising why this interests American executives.

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/mimo

The volume of these references does not appear to help define what employee engagement means, but whatever it is, it seems good (cf., Macey and Schneider 2008). In one form or another, HR researchers have studied aspects of what is now termed engagement for at least six decades. The heightened interest in this concept over the past two decades may have its origins in the profound changes in worker expectations, but it may also stem from results indicating that engagement can contribute to the corporate bottom line (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes, 2002), consistent with the corporate shareholder-centric focus of American businesses. Interestingly, American preoccupation with employee engagement, as evidenced by the tens of thousands press mentions indexed by Factiva and the over 38,000 website hits for the search term “employee engagement tools,” does not appear shared by the rest of the world (Table 1). Searching the appropriately translated term for employee engagement in Factiva returns hundreds, not thousands, of mentions. Repeating the search in academic journals also produces similar, although not quite so extreme, results (Figure 1). The implication is that employee engagement is mostly an American (perhaps Anglo-Saxon) construct barely recognized by non-American journalists and researchers. We must note, however, that some scholars have argued that engagement is not really a new concept, but simply a new way of looking at more traditional ideas about the role of positive affect at work (e.g., Newman and Harrison 2008), so that this discrepancy may be more a function of differential labeling rather than differential interest.

TABLE 1
Articles discussing employee engagement indexed by Factiva.

Language	Term(s)	Factiva hits
English	Terms used for search in English language publications^*
	Employee engagement	61,005
	Total	61,005
German	Terms used for search in German language publications^*
	Engagement der Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter	329
	Mitarbeiter engagement	659
	Arbeits engagement	88
	Employee engagement	271
	Total	1,347
French	Terms used for search in French language publications^*
	L'engagement au travail	80
	L’engagement des collaborateurs	261
	L'engagement des salariés	588
	Employee engagement	43
	Total	972
Spanish	Terms used for search in Spanish language publications^*
	El compromiso del empleado	131
	Implicación del empleado	56
	Implicación laboral	99
	Implicación del trabajador	87
	Employee engagement	75
	Total	448
Italian	Terms used for search in Italian language publications^*
	Engagement dei dipendenti	40
	Employee engagement	38
	Total	78

* The translated terms for employee engagement in German, French, Spanish, and Italian were sourced from articles in magazines, newspapers, and from personal communications with knowledgeable academic researchers from those countries.

FIGURE 1 National Origins of scholarly research on employee engagement.

This special issue offers a predominately non-American view of employee engagement. The authors address employee engagement from a variety of perspectives. They represent both empirical research and theoretical discussions. The articles have a distinctly international viewpoint with authors hailing from Europe, Middle East, Africa, and North America. The articles are primarily sourced from the EIASM Workshop on Strategic Human Resources², which is held annually in Europe. Given the cultural diversity of the authors, the articles offer unique perspectives on employee engagement ranging from employee engagement and sustainable human resource management practices (Stankevičiūtė and Savanevičienė Forthcoming), organizational commitment (Salminen and Miettinen Forthcoming; Onyemah Forthcoming), employee trust and performance (Vanhala and Dietz Forthcoming), employee engagement and the sense of self (Taghavi Forthcoming), to the role of culture, team member exchange, and organizational outcomes (Rutishauser and Sender Forthcoming). There is also an introduction to new digital tools (Burnett and Lisk Forthcoming) for measuring employee engagement, often in near real-time.³

During a workshop hosted by HEC Paris and Labex EcoDec⁴ and subsequent discussions, the invited authors hel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The COVID-19 Crisis – International Perspectives on Employee Engagement
• 1 International Perspectives on Employee Engagement: Are American Firms Leading the Way or Walking Alone?
• 2 What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You More Engaged: Rethinking the Link between Organizational Hardship and Organizational Commitment
• 3 How Trust in One’s Employer Moderates the Relationship Between HRM and Engagement Related Performance
• 4 Effect of Team-Member Exchange on Turnover Intention: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on a Selected Aspect of Employee Engagement
• 5 The Role of Perceived Development Opportunities on Affective Organizational Commitment of Older and Younger Nurses
• 6 Can Sustainable HRM Reduce Work-Related Stress, Work-Family Conflict, and Burnout?
• 7 Mental Construal and Employee Engagement: For More Engagement Look at the Big Picture
• 8 The Future of Employee Engagement: Real-Time Monitoring and Digital Tools for Engaging a Workforce
• Index