Employee engagement - Revisited

Abstract

Engaging employees has always been a startling challenge for any organisation. Despite gaining great significance, there prevails certain paucity on the academic literature front on employee engagement and more so an equal measure of perplexity in implementation of the concept of employee engagement in organisations. Still we find on at regular intervals, various definitions being formulated and getting circulated and also the process of engaging employees being practised and measured in organisations in different indigenous ways. Engaging Employees as a concept has been gaining prominence in the recent past as many organisations believe the process of engaging employees is a vital step to attain competitive advantage in their respective industry And in furtherance to this many research bodies have found in their studies that corporate outcomes validate strong linkage between performance of organisation and employee engagement For Instance, Research by Gallup Organization revealed that organisations that are highly committed to engaging employees are highly productive by 18% and highly profitable by 12% than other organisations in the industry. Further, the studies also point out that employee engagement as such on its definition and implementation, there exists a wide range of vagueness. Moreover, there also exists a gap between the literature available about the employee engagement and its implementation of the same in the organisation. This apparently proves that the concept of employee engagement is still at its early stages and need further exploration. The primary focus of this review paper is to highlight the need to enhance the existing knowledge on Employee Engagement by critically evaluating the prevailing literature on engaging employees and reporting the concerns regarding the shortfalls of what employee engagement actually needs to be effectively implemented. To start with, this review paper is based on observations from few articles that is being reviewed by other researchers, working papers, textbooks, and other published resources relevant to the concept of engaging employees from its etymology to its existing form. It is also based on articles sourced from on-line journal databases such as Research gate, Emerald Full text and Shoudhganga etc. This review paper also aims to identify and highlight the gaps in recognising influencers of Employee engagement. As it was observed there were ambiguity in identifying influencers and also that not much importance has been given to few influencers of employee engagement, such as organisational image, management and meaningfulness in job allocated to the employees. Also there is a need for future researches on few external factors having much indirect impact on the engagement level of the employees. Hence considering all of the above, following set of questions are being taken up for discussion in this review paper 1. How did the concept of engaging employees come into existence? 1.a. How was the definition derived? 1.b How was it implemented in phases? 1.c What are the influencers of employee engagement? 2. How does the factor management aid to the concept of engaging employees? 3. How does the factor organisation image aid to the concept of engaging employees? 4. How does the factor meaningfulness in job aid to the concept of engaging employees?.