The Company You Keep: Using Organizational Social Network Attributes to Predict Employee Engagement

Employee engagement (EE) has been shown to have important implications [1] for the success of organizations. Most researchers have discussed employee engagement in terms of factors in a top-down, hierarchical model of the organization. However, there may also be contributing factors from an employee’s organizational social network (OSN). In this paper, we show that an employee’s social network attributes can contribute to the prediction of engagement, primarily through centrality and homophily in a large, multinational company (LargeCorp). Our research expands the range of theoretical factors that can predict employee engagement from a vertical, three factor model to a more horizontal, four factor model. We also discuss how this work points toward a richer set of methods to predict and track engagement over time and its connections to the broader HCI research community.