The Meaning of Employee Engagement

The meaning of employee engagement is ambiguous among both academic researchers and among practitioners who use it in conversations with clients. We show that the term is used at different times to refer to psychological states, traits, and behaviors as well as their antecedents and outcomes. Drawing on diverse relevant literatures, we offer a series of propositions about (a) psychological state engagement; (b) behavioral engagement; and (c) trait engagement. In addition, we offer propositions regarding the effects of job attributes and leadership as main effects on state and behavioral engagement and as moderators of the relationships among the 3 facets of engagement. We conclude with thoughts about the measurement of the 3 facets of engagement and potential antecedents, especially measurement via employee surveys. The notion of employee engagement is a relatively new one, one that has been heavily marketed by human resource (HR) consulting firms that offer advice on how it can be created and leveraged. Academic researchers are now slowly joining the fray, and both parties are saddled with competing and inconsistent interpretations of the meaning of the construct. Casual observation suggests that much of the appeal to organizational management is driven by claims that employee engagement drives bottom-line results. Indeed, at least one HR consulting firm (Hewitt Associates LLC, 2005, p. 1) indicates that they ‘‘have established a conclusive, compelling relationship between engagement and profitability through higher productivity, sales, customer satisfaction, and employee retention.’’ Some practitioners view engagement as having evolved from prior research on work attitudes, directly implying that this newer concept adds interpretive value that extends beyond the boundaries of those traditions.We agreewith this thought and hope to show why we agree in what follows. Although compelling on the surface, the meaning of the employee engagement concept is unclear. In large part, this can be attributed to the ‘‘bottom-up’’ manner in which the engagement notion has quickly evolved within the practitioner community. This is not an unfamiliar stage in the incremental evolution of an applied psychological construct. Thus, similar to the manner in which burnout was at first a construct attributed to pop psychology (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001) engagement is a concept with a sparse and diverse theoretical and empirically demonstrated nomological net— the relationships among potential antecedents and consequences of engagement as well as the components of engagement have Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William H. Macey. E-mail: wmacey@ valtera.com Address: Valtera Corporation, 1701Golf Road, Suite 2-1100 Rolling Meadows, IL 60008 William H. Macey, Valtera Corporation; Benjamin Schneider, Valtera Corporation and University of Maryland. We appreciate the thoughtful comments of our colleagues Karen Barbera and Scott Young as well as constructive feedback from Paul Sackett and Allen Kraut. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1 (2008), 3–30. Copyright a 2008 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 1754-9426/08