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Introduction
“The concept of employee engagement has generated enormous interest in both academic and practitioner domains” (Albrecht, 2010, p. 3). It has become very popular in the fields of human resource management and, more recently, human resource development (HRD), in addition to actively being presented in the practitioner community (Shuck and Wollard, 2009). Engagement has been found to be highly related to job performance and greatly influences employees’ attitudes about organizational commitment (Harrison et al., 2006). More importantly, corporations lose, on average, more than $300 billion a year of productivity due to lack of employee engagement (Avery et al., 2007). According to the Gallup Organization, nearly 20 per cent of all US employees are disengaged and 54 per cent are neutral about their work (Fleming et al., 2005).
Consequently, employee engagement is a growing concern for human resource managers, business leaders and academic researchers and poses many challenges for practitioners. These challenges include the lack of understanding of the construct of engagement (Bledow et al., 2011) and the inability to find ways to facilitate engagement in employees (Bakker et al., 2011). A major challenge, according to Shuck and Wollard (2009), is determining what employee engagement is and how can it be better defined. More importantly, according to Shuck (2011), there are four very distinctive perspectives that employee engagement may fall under. Thus, Shuck’s work revealed an important facet of employee engagement, in that employee engagement may be viewed through four different lenses. For example, according to Kahn’s (1990) work, employee engagement may be seen through the lens of a need – satisfaction approach. Maslach et al.’s (2001) work views employee engagement from a burnout – antithesis approach. Harter et al. (2002) approach employee engagement through a satisfaction – engagement approach, and finally, Sak (2006) describes employee engagement from a multidimensional approach. Unfortunately, scholarly work on employee engagement often intertwines viewpoints, creating a lack of uniformity in their research. Shuck (2011) makes a valid argument that this lack of continuity makes it more confusing and difficult to create a uniform view of the phenomenon of employee engagement. Therefore, these challenges and lack of uniformity have created gaps in literature that hinder the creation of a practical application of the...