Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Engagement for a Diverse Workforce

Introduction

In the recent years, employee engagement has become a hot topic of discussion among popular business press and consulting firms (Anaza et al., 2016). This topic has created interest in various stakeholder groups ranging from scholarly (e.g.Kahn, 1990; Schaufeli et al., 2006, 2002), Human resource practitioners (e.g. Harter et al., 2002; Masson et al., 2008), to policy-makers or government agencies (e.g.MacLeod & Clarke 2009). On the one hand, the interest in employee engagement has progressively increased (Anaza et al., 2016), however in academic literature, the concept of employee engagement has been studied rarely and comparatively less is known regarding its antecedents and consequences. Recently, a number of researchers’ have argued that the challenge of engaging the employees is mounting (Fleming et al., 2005; May et al., 2004; Pech & Slade, 2006). Although it seeming conceptually overlap with existing constructs for instance job involvement, organizational commitment, still some empirical research confirms that engagement is a separate construct (Hallberg & Schaufeli, 2006).

As per a survey of 656 CEOs hailing from the countries across the globe, employee engagement is fourth significant management challenge, following reducing costs, creating loyal customers (Wah, 1999). Indeed, the Gallup Organization found recently that approximately twenty percent of US employees were disengaged and fifty four percent were successfully impartial regarding their work (Fleming et al., 2005). In addition, study conduct by Gallup and Towers Perrin (Seijts & Crim, 2006) advocates that disengage employee is equally challenging in other countries also. Thus, collectively the influence of these two trends - diversity in workforce and the rising challenge of employee engagement could prove problematical for various employers (Avery et al., 2007).The work force diversity will increase the chances of different diversity present in most of the work settings.

Although researcher has connected work force dissimilarity to various outcomes for instance organizational commitment and intention to stay (Riordan, 2000), still the effect of this divergence on employee engagement is uncertain. Understanding regarding this association is important as (a) meta-analytic evidence and the other findings have revealed employee engagement to predict the key outcomes, for instance customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, employee turnover, productivity, safety, and profitability (Harter et al., 2002; Salanova et al., 2005), and (b) because employee engagement has a direct influence on performance, while the influence of job attitudes for example organizational commitment are indirect in nature (Harrison et al., 2006).

Employee engagement has become a broadly used and famous term (Robinson et al., 2004). However, majority of writings about employee engagement can be found in the practitioner journals, where this concept has its base in practice instead of theory and empirical studies. Robinson et al. (2004) noted there has been shockingly little empirical and academic research on a subject that has become so famous. Consequently, employee engagement has the emergence of being something called as, “old wine in a new bottle”.