Employee Engagement: The Key to Better Performance

To achieve profitability, focusing on employee engagement is significant in an organization, since Daniels(as cited in Arrowsmith and Parker, 2013) states that highly engaged employees tend to be more satisfied, productive, loyal and positive towards their work and organizations, which results in higher performance and lower cost. Shuck(2011) also points out that the development of employee engagement has a vital impact on the organizational outcomes. Employee engagement refers to an employee’s involvement with, satisfaction with, enthusiasm about and commitment to the job. This essay will discuss a typical facet of employee engagement: state engagement. At the same time, different practices of improving employee engagement to energize and engage workers to ensure the success in the organization such as strategic human resources planning, goal initials and communication; compensation and benefits; changing organizational structure and leadership; spread of the organization value will be referred to.

As psychological state engagement, engagement could be categorized into job satisfaction, organizational commitment, psychological empowerment and job involvement. Firstly, job satisfaction could be defined as an employee’s attitude towards his job. According to Shuck(2010), Macey and Schneider(2008), although there are similarities between engagement and satisfaction, engagement is beyonds satisfaction that is measured descriptively and engagement mainly focuses on the willingness of contributing discretionarily to the organization. They also point out that only when satisfaction is measured as emotions or states, could satisfaction be considered as one part of engagement. Secondly, organizational commitment refers to individual’s psychological adherence to, loyalty to and recognition of the organization. Macey and Schneider(2008) states that organizational commitment is a crucial part of employee engagement as psychological state when it is assessed as the