Employee Engagement: A Literature Review on Organisational Management

This paper reviews the literature on organizational behaviour and management to discover the extents and backgrounds of employee engagement, its causes, and results. The paper highlights the conceptualization of employee engagement, factors that cause it, and its results. It also discusses the importance of leadership, social support, communication, and job characteristics in achieving employee engagement. The paper concludes that employee engagement is an essential human resource variable for most companies and is crucial for effective management of business operations.

Organisational Behaviour and
Management
Literature Review

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Overview of topic...................................................................................................................2
Literature Review...................................................................................................................2
What causes it?...................................................................................................................3
What it results in?...............................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................8
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EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Introduction
This paper reviews the literature on organizational behaviour and management to discover the
extents and backgrounds. The paper will highlight the conceptualization of employee
engagement, a factor that causes it and its results.
Overview of topic
Employee engagement is an approach of workplace that helps in bringing right situations for
every member of the company to contribute their best efforts every day, committed to their
values and goals of the company, encouraged to add something to the success of the
company, with an improved sense of their own comfort. Employee engagement is dependent
on integrity, commitment, trust, and communication between the company and its members.
There is increase in the chances of the business success due to this approach, adds to
individual and organizational performance, well-being, and productivity. Various companies
do measure Employee engagement. It differs from poor to great. It can be cultivated and
intensely enlarged; it can be mislaid and thrown away (Engage your success, 2018).
Literature Review
One of the essential resources of an organization is its employees. Worldwide there is rise in
the skill war and hence every company needs to confirm that besides appealing excellent
talent they need to retain these skilled employees. Employee Retention in a company is not
just enough as one employee might be talented but may lack the passion for his/her work.
According to Pandita and Bedarkar (2014), the hardest encounters facing human resource,
business leaders, and Chief Executive officers, of various companies is to confirm that the
time employees report to their job daily they do not just need to be available there physically
but also emotionally and mentally. This reflects that company should confirm that their
workers are involved so that they can add something positively towards the attainment of
goals of the organization. Kahn (1990) is the father of movement of employee engagement
distinct it as “hitching of members of the organization’ selves to their roles of work; in the
engagement of worker and show themselves emotionally, substantially, and cognitively
during job performances. Through this, Kahn inferred that a worker has to exist both
psychologically and physically while executing organizational roles.
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Kamau (2016) defines three engagement levels: A). Engaged-employees who perform their
role with full passion and sense a deep link to their company. They carry invention and help
in moving the company towards growth. B). Not engaged-employees- that appear and
contribute in work however known as timeserving and lack in passion towards completing
their roles or job. C). Disengaged-employees are those employees that are not happy with
their work and who turn out their sadness at the job. As per Kamau (2016), these workers
dent the performance of their involved co-workers every time. It is so significant for a
business to measure the level of the engagement of its workers such that they can take the
essential interference to increase confidence and output of the workers.
What causes it?
Leadership
According to Ologbo and Saudah (2011), consistency of the leadership helps in making
employee confident and self-assured. Support from the company’s leader, trust in the leader
and making a blame-free is a mechanisms of psychological security, a state projected by
Kahn, which results in worker engagement (Sma, 2016).
As per Pandita and Bedarkar (2014), two factors are definitely connected with the
engagement i.e., mentoring and management and behaviours like conveying self-assurance to
groups, communication, and clarification of the role, power sharing, and enunciation of the
vision that could be considered as impracticable, conclusive, team-oriented, and inspirational.
As per Men, (2015) studies have exposed substantial belongings of authentic leadership on
the worker engagement; the aspects like relationships of employee-organization, transparent
communication, and internal reputation typically arbitrate these influences.
Social Support
Social support denotes that support which an employee receive from its co-workers and
administrators. There is a positive link with the engagement if there is Social support from
the co-workers and managers (Ologbo and Saudah, 2007, Schaufeli and Salonova, 2008).
Helpful co-workers and correct comment from the managers upsurge the probability of
working effectively in attaining the objectives of the job (Bakker, 2013). According to
Schaufeli (2013), the social support satisfies the needs of the employees.
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Communication
Internal communication is a practice of an organization, which properly carries values of the
organization to every employee and hence, gets their support in attaining goals of the
organization (Pandita and Bedarkar, 2014). As per the discussion of Ologbo and Saudah
(2011) workers require explanations if they want to perform well whereas Hakanen et.al.
(2006) discussed that there is connection between the information obtainability with the
engagement, because the probability of receiving information increases the chances of
attainment of goals and completion of the task allocated to the employee. However, learning
by Men (2015) exposed that conflicting to anticipation, transparent communication does not
significantly and directly affect engagement. The relationships of employee-organization and
internal status arbitrate these types of effects. In the conclusion, Men (2015) said that, by
developing the value of employee- relationships, the transparent communication incidentally
pushes engagement of employee.
Job Characteristics
According to Kahn (1990), characteristics of the task helps in achieving psychological
importance because it provide work which is challenging; variety permits the usage of varied
skills, individual pleasure, and the chance to make noteworthy contributions. Along with this
Kahn (1990) also discussed that workers, who are engaged in their work or job which are in
height on the essential characteristics of the job, are more probable to be engaged.
According to Delbridge (2013), employees respond confidently to the five main scopes i.e.
task identity, autonomy, skill variety, feedback, and task significance. He added that there is
presence of proof from the investigation that workers who perform their roles high in these
specified scopes reflect high satisfaction of the job or work, attendance, and motivation. Job
enrichment is effectively associated with the meaningfulness, and that meaningfulness
facilitated the association between engagement and job enrichment (Kamau and Sma, 2016).
What it results in?
Career Development
As discussed by Mehta (2016), Companies with employees that are highly engaged offer their
employee various opportunities to develop abilities, learn skills, obtain knowledge, and touch
their potential. Practices of career development support companies in retaining the skilled
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employees and offer opportunities for personal development. Workers incline to devote to
businesses that spend on them by scheduling for their career development. Career
development is the worldwide aspect of the employee engagement. Along with this, a
satisfactory level of worker development through skills, learning, and training can lead to
creating workers engaged in terms of their organization and job.
Effective talent management
Friendly culture of the company in relation to Employee engagement appreciated the
diversity in terms of skills and talents that comes in the company along with the workers and
prompts the workers to desire for and attain the future vision. A strategy of talent
management encompassing organizational support, incentives, and career planning can effect
in reduced attrition levels and high engagement in the organization. According to Chandani
(2016), one single factor influences employee engagement that is effective management
among other factors. However, the results also disclose that there is no available one set
model that reflects the significance and relevance of the effect of every variable as diverse
employees place diverse importance on the variables affecting engagement. These differences
can arise because of variations in discrete and gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and job
characteristics, etc. Along with this, the alteration between leadership and engagement factors
i.e. relationship orientation and task orientation reflected huge overlap (Chandani and Mehta,
2016).
Conclusion
Engagement is said to be an essential human resource variable for the most of the companies.
Employee engagement is an approach that companies adopt to involve employees in the
organization activities and decisions in order to have improved performance. Engaged
employees put extra efforts and skills, learn faster, and are very creative. Moreover, they are
the ambassadors of the organization. In the conclusion, for the performance of the company
and management of business operations effectively it is very important to have employee
engagement approach. The above paper has represented various aspects of the employee
engagement i.e. what causes worker engagement and what are the results of employee
engagement. The paper have highlighted that employee engagement can be attained in an
organization by executing effective and successful leadership within the organization, further
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with the social support, communication, and job characteristics that are also explained. Along
with this, there are some outcomes or results of employee engagement that is career
development and effective management of the talent.
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References
Bakar, R.A. (2013) Understanding Factors Influencing Employee Engagement: A Study of
the Financial Sector in Malaysia [online]. Available from
https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:160447/Abu_Bakar.pdf [accessed 3 July 2018]
Chandani, A., and Mehta, M. (2016) Employee engagement: A review paper on factors
affecting employee engagement. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 9(15).
Delbridge, R., Shantz, A., and Soane, E. (2013) Employee Engagement in Theory and
Practice. 1st edn. U.S: Routledge.
Engage your success (2018) What is Employee Engagement? [online]. Available from
http://engageforsuccess.org/what-is-employee-engagement [accessed 3 July 2018]
Hakanen, J., Bakker, A.B., and Schaufeli, W.B. (2006) Burn out and work engagement
among teachers. The Journal of School Psychology, 43(2006), 495-513.
Kahn, W. (1990) Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at
work. Academy of Management Journal, 33, (4), 692-724.
Kamau, O., and Sma, M. (2016) A Critical Review Of Literature On Employee Engagement
Concept. International Journal of Research In Social Sciences, 6(3), 1-8.
Men, L.R. (2015) Employee engagement in relation to employee- organization relationship
and internal reputation: effects of leadership and communication. Public Relations Journal, 9
(2), 11-22.
Ologbo, C.A., & Saundah, S. (2011) Engaging people who drive execution and
organizational performance. American Journal of Economic and Business Administration, 3
(3), 569-575.
Pandita, D., and Bedarkar, M. (2014) A study on drivers of engagement impacting employee
performance. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 133(2014), 106-115.
Schaufeli, W. (2013) What is Engagement? [online]. Available from
https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/414.pdf [accessed 3 July 2018]
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Schaufeli, W.B., & Salonova, M. (2008) Work engagement: An emerging concept in
occupational health psychology. Work & Stress, 22(3), 187-200.
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