Healthy Boundaries: How to Draw the Line in Defining Employee Engagement

Healthy Boundaries
How to Draw the Line in Defining Employee Engagement

kristiholl.net 

The key to improving something is to measure it, and in order to measure something properly, one has to define it clearly and concisely. My doctoral research aimed to do just that for employee engagement: put some boundaries around this expansive idea and create a tool to measure that definition of employee engagement. According to people who do measurement of abstract ideas for a living (e.g., university researchers), definitions of complicated ideas should be grounded in: (1) history, (2) reality and (3) context (MacKenzie et al., 2011).

I described in my most recent post how employee engagement evolved over time to include both academic and practitioner influences. As a result, employee engagement has become all things to all people. I also interviewed 10 practitioners who had 10 different definitions of employee engagement. So when history and reality fail to converge to define employee engagement, one can turn to context or, in this case, know scientific theories, to begin to draw clean edges.

Of course, there are many theories that might be meaningfully applied to employee engagement and its relationships with other concepts in organizational and management science. For example, many researchers look to social exchange and equity theories as ways of understanding how employee engagement relates to organizational practices or structures. But few theories discussed in literature provide in and of themselves a rationale for including or excluding attributes in the definition of employee engagement.

One theory I found useful in making sense of employee engagement is attitude theory. Attitudes are predispositions to respond to something favorably or unfavorably, and they are powerful predictors of behavior. Attitudes have three components: thoughts, feelings and motivation to act in a particular way. Not only did describing employee engagement in these three facets make sense intuitively, it was consistent with descriptors of employee engagement I'd found during my literature review and interviews with experts. For example, Towers Perrin has described employee engagement in terms of rational, emotional and motivational components.

In the coming several posts, I’m going to speak in a bit more detail and share some quotes from the experts I interviewed that will demonstrate where I think the boundaries lie with respect to the different facets of employee engagement. In the meantime, I would be interested to hear form all of you about what theories you’ve heard discussed in relationship to employee engagement!