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Introduction
Employee engagement has become one of the most important workplace topics for academics, practitioners and organizations. This stems, in large part, from the many studies that have found that employee engagement is related to employee attitudes, behavior, performance and well-being as well as organizational performance (Halbesleben, 2010; Saks and Gruman, 2014). It is now generally believed that employee engagement can provide organizations with a competitive advantage (Macey et al., 2009; Rich et al., 2010).
The majority of research on employee engagement has focused on the job or work as the target of employee engagement. However, other targets of employee engagement have been proposed including the organization or what is referred to as organization engagement (Saks, 2006, 2019; Saks and Gruman, 2014). The present paper provides a review of the extant research on the antecedents and consequences of organization engagement and a comparison to job engagement. First, however, a brief overview of employee engagement research is presented.
Employee engagement
According to Kahn (1990), personal engagement refers to “the harnessing of organizational members' selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively and emotionally during role performances” (p. 694). Thus, when individuals are engaged, it means that they bring all aspects of themselves into the performance of their work role. Kahn's (1990) definition considers engagement to be a multidimensional motivational construct that involves the investment of an individual's complete and full self in the performance of a role (Rich et al., 2010). Although Kahn (1990) refers to personal engagement and considers it to be a role-specific construct, his research focused on job engagement and the extent to which participants were engaged in the performance of work tasks.
Schaufeli et al. (2002) defined work engagement “as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication and absorption” (p. 74). Vigor involves high levels of energy and mental resilience while working; dedication refers to being strongly involved in one's work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm and challenge; and absorption refers to being fully concentrated on and engrossed in one's work. According to Schaufeli et al. (2002), engagement is “a more persistent and pervasive affective-cognitive state that is not focused on any particular object,...