Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Given the strategic relevance of employee engagement, it has now become a phenomenon of high importance, high up on the agenda of organizations and popular in management literature. This organizational behavior was articulated by Professor Kahn in 1990 and since then it has become a top organizational concern for researchers and practitioners alike. People want to find meaningfulness at work and will employ discretionary effort in their job roles if the conditions are right. Talent management and retention have become essential aspect of human resources (HR) strategy and employee engagement is a viable solution. Employee engagement has been linked to positive organizational outcomes. Every organization seeks to retain their employee, frown at high employee turnover and increase positive organizational outcomes. In most organizations, HR professionals have recognized employee engagement as a problem facing industries. Data from recognized management consultants' organizations, Gallup, Blessing White, CIPD and Towers Watson on comprehensive employee engagement surveys were analyzed. Findings indicated that employee engagement was related to nine (9) organizational outcomes viz. "customer loyalty/engagement, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, patient safety incidents, and quality (defects)" Harter et al. (2013).
Keywords: employee engagement, employee commitment, job satisfaction, performance, retention, organizational citizenship behavior.
Introduction:
All other things being equal an engaged workforce provides competitive advantage over a rival company; this has become a widely held and uncontroversial view. However, opinions on engagement and what spurs engagement in today's workers differ. Organizations can extract 'discretionary energy' that resides in their workforce. Employees can increase the probability of higher profitability, better services, customer loyalty, safety and sales by employing discretionary efforts in their work roles (Kruse, 2012). When an employee cares more, there is the tendency to get involved and make greater contributions to the company, thereby resulting in organizational citizenship, commitment and intent to stay; reducing employee turnover (Kruse, 2012). This scenario translates to customer satisfaction and brings about customer loyalty which is a panacea for more profit and growth for the company (see figure 1).
In the real world of human resources management (HRM) this is not always the case, employee engagement is low among today's employees and their employers as reported in literature. Bates (2004) observed that several researches by highly respected consulting firms in the...