31-08-2012, 04:11 PM
Employee Engagement and Commitment
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Employee Engagement and Commitment
Employees who are engaged in their work and committed to their organizations give
companies crucial competitive advantages—including higher productivity and lower
employee turnover. Thus, it is not surprising that organizations of all sizes and types
have invested substantially in policies and practices that foster engagement and commitment
in their workforces. Indeed, in identifying the three best measures of a company’s
health, business consultant and former General Electric CEO Jack Welch
recently cited employee engagement first, with customer satisfaction and free cash flow
coming in second and third, respectively.1 “Reaping Business Results at Caterpillar”
and “Engagement Pays Off at Molson Coors Brewing Company” show two examples
of companies that benefited from enhancing engagement and commitment.
Employee Engagement: Key Ingredients
“Employee Engagement Defined” shows examples of engagement definitions used by
various corporations and consultancies. Clearly, definitions of employee engagement
vary greatly across organizations. Many managers wonder how such an elusive concept
can be quantified. The term does encompass several ingredients for which researchers
have developed measurement techniques. These ingredients include the degree to
which employees fully occupy themselves in their work, as well as the strength of their
commitment to the employer and role. Fortunately, there is much research on these
elements of engagement—work that has deep roots in individual and group psychology.
The sections following highlight some of these studies.
Occupying the Job
Psychologist William Kahn5 drew on studies of work roles6 and organizational socialization7
to investigate the degrees to which people “occupy” job roles. He used the
terms “personal engagement” and “personal disengagement” to represent two ends of a
continuum. At the “personal engagement” end, individuals fully occupy themselves—
physically, intellectually and emotionally—in their work role. At the “personal disengagement”
end, they uncouple themselves and withdraw from the role.
How do people become personally engaged in their work activities? Why do they
become more engaged in some activities than others? Scholars have proposed answers
to these questions based on their studies of the psychology of commitment.
Committing to the Work and the Company
Some experts define commitment as both a willingness to persist in a course of action
and reluctance to change plans, often owing to a sense of obligation to stay the course.
People are simultaneously committed to multiple entities, such as economic, educational,
familial, political and religious institutions.8,9 They also commit themselves to
specific individuals, including their spouses, children, parents and siblings, as well as to
their employers, co-workers, supervisors and customers.
Commitment manifests itself in distinct behavior. For example, people devote time
and energy to fulfill their on-the-job responsibilities as well as their family, personal,
community and spiritual obligations. Commitment also has an emotional component:
People usually experience and express positive feelings toward an entity or individual to
whom they have made a commitment.10 Finally, commitment has a rational element:
Most people consciously decide to make commitments, then they thoughtfully plan
and carry out the actions required to fulfill them.11
The Link Between Employer Practices and Employee Engagement
How does an engaged workforce generate valuable business results for an organization?
The process starts with employer practices such as job and task design, recruitment,
selection, training, compensation, performance management and career development.
Such practices affect employees’ level of engagement as well as job performance.
Performance and engagement then interact to produce business results. Figure 1
depicts these relationships.