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Employee Engagement

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Job engagement is a relatively new construct in academic literature and an increasingly popular idea in practice. Proponents of Job engagement claim a strong positive relationship between engagement and business success, both at the firm and individual levels, and outcomes including retention, productivity, profitability, and customer loyalty and satisfaction. Job Engagement is a multi-faceted construct (Kahn, 1990). Although there is a great deal of interest in engagement, there is also a good deal of confusion. At present, there is no consistency in definition, with engagement having been operationalised and measured in many disparate ways. According to Kahn (1990), engagement means to be psychologically as well as physically present when occupying and performing an organisational role. Most often Job engagement has been defined as emotional and intellectual commitment to the organisation (Baumruk 2004, Richman 2006 and Shaw 2005) or the amount of discretionary effort exhibited by employees in their job (Frank et al 2004).

Engagement vs Other Constructs

Researchers have raised the issue if Job engagement is a rehashing of old ideas. It is also argued the definitions often sound similar to other better known and established constructs such as ‘organisational commitment’ and ‘organisational citizenship behaviour’ (OCB) (Robinson et al 2004). According to May et al (2004) engagement is most closely associated with the constructs of job involvement and ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990)
May et al (2004) found that meaningfulness, safety, and availability were significantly related to engagement An alternative model of engagement comes from the ‘burnout’ literature, which describes job engagement as the positive antithesis of burnout, noting that burnout involves the erosion of engagement with one’s job (Maslach et al 2001) Kahn’s (1990) and Maslach et al’s (2001) models indicate the psychological conditions or antecedents that are necessary for engagement, but they do not fully explain why individuals will respond to these conditions with varying degrees of engagement. For the present purpose the term work engagement and job engagement is used synonymously.

Employee engagement in Non- profit sector: A Literature Review

Job engagement of employees in the non-profit has been under researched. Job engagement has been studied in the context of for profit organisation in much detail. In the literature review, I have found scant reference of Job engagement of the non-profit workers. The nature of the third sector has been very different from the commercial establishments. Therefore the Job engagement dynamics is going to be different as well. Across industries, engagement is substantially higher in the Third sector than in every other sector looked at by Towers Perrin (2003). This would appear logical, given that people tend to be drawn to this sector through a sense of mission, rather than from any prospect of high pay or wealth accumulation. This finding is also consistent with the numerous definitions and views surrounding engagement, which identifies a ‘passion for work’ as being a key component factor (Truss et al 2006, Brim 2002 and Holbeche and Springett 2003). Indeed, the fact that the sector is traditionally not a high-paying one, relative to the others studied, emphasises the fact that it is not possible to ‘buy’ engagement in the conventional sense by offering better than average monetary awards. Conversely, in another study comparing the public and private sectors, Truss et al (2006) found that group in the public sector had a more negative experience of work, they reported more bullying and harassment than those in the private sector, and were less satisfied with the opportunities they had to use their abilities.

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