Managing Organizations Through Employee Engagement: An Indian Perspective

Introduction

Employee Engagement is a very prevalent term gaining lot of attention from researchers and HR practitioners. Kahn (1990) defines employee engagement as “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances”. He stated that if an employee is to be engaged than three psychological engagement conditions are important: meaningfulness which focuses on work elements, safety (social elements, including management style, process, and organizational norms) and availability (individual distractions).The employee engagement may further be defined as an emotional and intellectual commitment towards the organisation (Baumruk, 2004; Richman, 2006 & Shaw, 2005) or the amount of discretionary effort depicted by employees in their job (Frank et al 2004). Apart from these definitions Robinson et al (2004) throw some light on the employee engagement with different perspective. They mentioned that feeling of being valued and higher degree of involvement in the organization enhances the employee engagement. They further propagated that feelingof being valued in the organization is derived from various policies and practices implemented in the organization. Training and development, communication, Co-operation are some policies which makes an employees feel valued in the organization while job satisfaction, family friendliness and immediate management increases their involvement within the organization. Truss et al.(2006) defined employee engagement as passion for work. Later on Schaufeli and Bakker (2010) defines work engagement as “the psychological state that accompanies the behavioural investment of personal energy”. Since its evolution, employee engagement has been continuously researched in relation to its importance, antecedents, consequences, impacts on the organizational outputs like performance and productivity. An employee is said to be engaged if he/she attains the objectives, stay committed with the organization and represents the company.

Saks (2006) clarifies the three often related terminologies like organizational commitment (OC), job involvement and employee engagement. Employee engagement differs substantially from organizational commitment . OC focuses on the attitude and association of individual with the organization while engagement is not an attitude it is the degree to an individual is attentive and absorbed in the performance of their roles. Voluntary and informal behaviors that can help co-workers and the organizations are the important aspects of OC while the focus of engagement is one’s formal role performance rather than extra-role and voluntary behavior. Further employee engagement also differs from job involvement. According to May et al. (2004), job involvement is the consequence of a cognitive judgment about the need satisfying abilities of the job and is tied to one’s self-image. In short, employee engagement is a different and idiosyncratic theory that consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elementswhich are associated with individual role performance.

Types Of Employee Engagememt

The research conducted by Gallup Organization elaborated the concept of employee engagement and found out three different categories of employees in relation to engagement which are as follows (Taylor & Woodhams, 2016 p. 88)

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  Engaged employees (employees who are consistent in giving excellent results),

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  Not engaged employees (believes in just completing the allocated task and has little focus on the overall goals of the organization)

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  Actively disengaged employees (individual who are non- performers and play a constructive role in demotivating others).