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Editors note: This article contains excerpts from the report Employee Engagement Definitions, Measures and Outcomes, published by the London-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Employee engagement has been an established management topic since the early 1990s and, over the past two decades, has become firmly embedded as a core area of HR. It is a fixture of management consultancy, management research, Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) qualifications and university teaching and, most importantly, HR prac-tice, where dedicated employee engagement specialists are not uncommon. Employee engagement has also become a focal point for executive teams, boards and investors, who often recognize its importance as an indicator of organizational health and use it to inform decisions, including on executive pay (CIPD/High Pay Centre 2020).
A critical point in its development in the United Kingdom was the government-commissioned MacLeod Review, Engaging for Success, (MacLeod and Clarke 2009), which cemented it as a focal point in the government s industrial strategy, signaled its importance to business and research world and led to an energetic and influential movement - Engage for Success, which promotes management practice that fosters employee engagement. The rise of research on the topic has been enduring and supported by state funding (UKRI/ESRC 2019), and the use of engagement metrics in organizations has risen to the extent that they are one of the three most-used employee metrics for informing CEO bonuses and long-term incentive plans (CIPD/High Pay Centre 2020).
However, in the world of HR concepts, employee engagement is a tricky customer, often seen as contentious and woolly. Numerous definitions and measures exist, and it is often treated inconsistently, being described one moment as a broad umbrella term for an overarching area of people management and the next moment treated as a precise construct that can be convincingly pinned down and measured.
This report began by focusing on the important relationship between employee engagement and improved performance.
Claims about the performance benefits of employee engagement are often made based on shaky evidence, which is to say that it may appear to support the claims of benefits, but other explanations are quite possible or even likely. Through systematic search methods and critical appraisal, we can identify the studies that do the best job of establishing whether...