Employee Engagement and Firm Performance: Moderating Role of Employee Well-Being. An Empirical Study in Sri Lankan Apparel Industries

Abstract

Due to globalisation and the dynamic business environment, organisations quest to improve their business performance by crafting various compelling strategies. Recently, employee engagement and well-being have gained dramatic popularity among managers and practitioners as a salient strategy to augment firm performance. Paradoxically, research on the association between employee engagement, employee well-being and firm performance is still nascent, and past findings are obscure. Moreover, most of the studies have been conducted in a developed country context; thus, the results obtained from developed countries cannot be general sable to the developing country context. Thus, the overriding purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating role of employee well-being in the relationship between employee engagement and firm performance. Using a purposive sampling technique, data were marshaled through a self-reported questionnaire from 177 employees working in the apparel industries in Sri Lanka. The data were analyzed using Smart PLS. The study showed a significant positive relationship between employee engagement and firm performance. In addition, " the results reveal a moderating effect of employee well-being on the relationship between employee engagement and firm performance ". The study contributed to the frontiers of extant HRM literature in many ways discussed at the end of the paper. Notably, this study adds to the evolving debate on the critical role of employee engagement in enhancing firm performance through employee well-being.