Employee engagement - Sine qua non for organizations growth
| Pages | 187-188 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-08-2019-165 |
| Date | 12 August 2019 |
| Published date | 12 August 2019 |
| Author | Swaminathan Mani,Mridula Mishra |
| Subject Matter | Hr & organizational behaviour,Employee behaviour |
Strategic commentary
Employee engagement - Sine qua non for
organizations growth
Swaminathan Mani and Mridula Mishra
Employee engagement has
been getting the attention of
academia and practitioners,
alike, for the past two decades. More
so, in the recent past, employee
engagement has been listed as one
of the top three priorities of HR
practitioners across the world.There
is a general agreement among HR
managers that an engaged employee
expends significant amount of
discretionary efforts towards
organization’s growth and thereforeis
critical for organizations performance
and success, compared to someone
who is just “getting-by”.
Many researchers have published
seminal literature on the topic –the
most notable one from Saks (2006)
who made the distinction betweenjob
engagement and organizational
engagement. While, intuitively both
Job and Organization engagement
may appear the same to a casual
observer, they are not –there is
significant distinction betweentheir
constructs. Saks’ (2006) model
identified the antecedents(Jobs
characteristics, perceived
organizational support,perceived
supervisor support, rewards&
recognition, procedural justiceand
distributive justice) and the
consequence (Job satisfaction,
organizational commitment,intention
to quit, organizational citizenship
behavior) of employee engagement.
The model is anchored on thesocial
exchange theory conceptswhich
states that a reciprocal
interdependence developsbetween
employees and organizationalwhich
evolves into trust, over time, provided
both parties abide by rules of
engagement. The employees commit
their emotional, physical and
cognitive selves in exchange for
resources (social, economic)
provided by the organization.
Saks empirically tested the model
with 102 respondents on a five-point
Likert scale using snowball sampling.
Apart from establishing the
hypothesis that job and organization
engagement are different constructs,
the results also confirmed that
perceived organization support
predicted both job and organizational
engagement of the employees, while
procedural justice predicts
organizational engagement.In
addition, job characteristics
(constructs include skill variety,task
identity, task significance,autonomy
and feedback) predict job
engagement. More importantly,these
two constructs of job and organization
engagement mediated betweenthe
antecedents and consequence
variables of the model construct.
There have been other studies,that
are equally significant, that spoke on
engagement. For example, Kahn
(1990) explained engagementacross
three dimensions of meaningfulness,
safety and availability, while Schaufeli
and Bakker (2004) used the levers of
vigor, dedication and absorption to
explain employee engagement.
Several academic studies testedthe
Swaminathan Mani and
Mridula Mishra are both based at
Lovely Professional University,
Phagwara, India.
DOI 10.1108/SHR-08-2019-165 VOL. 18 NO. 4 2019, pp. 187-188, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEW jPAGE 187
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