Employee Engagement Shemes

Chapter 1.INTRODUCTION

1.1 Concept of employee engagement

1.1.1 Defining Engagement

One of the challenges of defining engagement is the lack of a universal definition of employee engagement, as a research focus on employees’ work engagement is relatively new.

More often than not, definitions of engagement include cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. The cognitive aspect of engagement includes employees’ beliefs about the organization, management and working conditions. The emotional components (or beliefs) defines employees positive attitude, how they "feel" about their employer, company’s values, leaders and working conditions (Kahn, 1990; Towers Perrin, 2003; Robinson et al. 2004). The behavioral components measure the willingness to act in certain ways, skills which employees offer (Towers Perrin, 2003) and willingness to go the "extra mile” — some of these components are often used for the employee engagement definition.

Academic literature presents a couple of definitions of engagement. One of the first and most recognizable definitions of engagement is provided by Kahn (1990) and it suggests that personal engagement is: “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performance (p.694)”. His view concentrates on the personal engagement of workers in order to emphasize performance improvement through employing and expressing themselves on physical, cognitive and emotional levels during their performance. In the case of disengagement employees withdraw from role performance and try to defend themselves physically, cognitively or emotionally (Kahn, 1990). In summary, following Kahn (1990), engagement means the employees’ psychological presence at work.

Burnout researchers suggest that engagement is the opposite, a positive antitheses of burnout (Maslach et al. 2001). Maslach et al. (2001) state that

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