DDBA 8151 Case Study Guide
Part 1: Theoretical Foundations
Employee Engagement: Researchers’ Perspective
Kahn (1990) approached the issue of employee engagement by drawing on theory of
self and how different selves interact with the roles people need to play at their
workplace. He postulated that “People can use varying degrees of their selves,
physically, cognitively, and emotionally, in the roles they perform, even as they maintain
the integrity of the boundaries between who they are and the roles they occupy.
Presumably, the more people draw on their selves to perform their roles within those
boundaries, the more stirring are their performances and the more content they are with
the fit of the costumes they don” (p. 692). Kahn drew on research from various
perspectives, such as interpersonal, group, intergroup, and organizational research, and
combined them with the job-design perspective developed by Hackman and Oldham
(1980). Kahn’s assumption was that as job design determined the roles individuals need
to play within a work setting, it was a key determinant of the “self” elicited from the
employees who play those roles. Job design was hypothesized to be instrumental in
determining whether an employee will use an engaged or disengaged self in role. He
defined the two opposite types of engagement as follows: “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 performances. . . . Personal disengagement [is] the uncoupling of selves from work
roles; in disengagement, people withdraw and defend themselves physically,
cognitively, or emotionally during role performances” (1990, p. 694). Thus, according to
Kahn, engagement is a psychological reaction to the job role people are required to play
in their work, and it comprises three aspects of such a reaction: cognitive, affective, and
behavioral.
Rothbard (2001) had a more focused take on the issue of employee engagement and
proposed two critical components that distinguish an engaged from a disengaged
employee: attention and absorption. Specifically, attention was defined as “cognitive
availability and the amount of time one spends thinking about a role”; while absorption
“means being engrossed in a role and refers to the intensity of one’s focus on a role” (p.
656). This perspective lays more emphasis on the cognitive component of engagement
and is more akin to the concept of psychological presence, dedicated focus on the job,
and being away from any mental distractions that may lower job performance.
Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter (2001) had a different take on the concept of
engagement and viewed it as the positive end of a continuum, with job burnout on the
negative end. According to them, as burnout is characterized by exhaustion, cynicism,
and inefficacy, engagement is its polar opposite with characteristics of energy,
involvement, and efficacy. Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002)
went on to define engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is
characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption” (p. 74). To them, such a heightened © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 2 of 9
state of vigor, dedication, and absorption is neither a momentary high, nor target
specific, but a highly persistent and pervasive affective cognitive state.
Thus, we see that besides the obvious similarities there are slight but extremely
significant differences in which the above-mentioned researchers have conceptualized
the construct of engagement. For Kahn (1990), job engagement is pretty role specific,
and it is in fact the role that determines what type of self will be elicited (engaged versus
disengaged). The state of engagement or burnout is pretty diffuse and long lasting
(pervasive and not targeted) according to Schaufeli et al. (2002). However, they agree
on the belief that bad job design may be the contributing factor for disengagement
(according to Kahn) or burnout (according to Maslach et al., 2001).
To compound the problem, various definitions of engagement do not take enough care
to distinguish the concept from other similar constructs such as job involvement, job
commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). There are questions
regarding whether engagement is an attitude (having three components of cognition,
affect, and behavior and similar to the concept of job satisfaction) or whether it is more
akin to motivation (a heightened state of goal-directed behavior as in vigor).
Practitioners do not have too much problem with the issue as long as the construct can
be reliably used to predict and manage team or organizational performance. In the
following section, we will see how some of the practitioners in this field have defined
and used the construct of engagement.
Employee Engagement: Practitioners’ Perspective
When it comes to measuring and defining engagement, the foremost name in the
practitioners’ world is Gallup, Inc., which developed the Gallup Workplace Audit (GWA,
popularly known as the Q12), a questionnaire used to measure employee engagement.
It comprises 12 questions, plus an overall satisfaction question making it a 13-item
questionnaire. The questionnaire items were found to have a highly significant relation
to unit-level measures of a company’s performance (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002).
Thus, rather than being driven by theory, Gallup’s approach has been more empirical.
The items in the questionnaire are a measure of attitudinal outcomes (satisfaction,
loyalty, pride, customer service intent, and intent to stay with the company) and
measure issues that are within the remit of a supervisor in charge of a given business
unit. Gallup compiled rich data of employee surveys for over 30 years, and based on
their understanding of employee behavior that had maximal impact on a firm’s
performance, they defined engagement as “the individual’s involvement and satisfaction
with as well as enthusiasm for work” (2002, p. 269).
Based on their national survey of U.S. workers using their engagement questionnaire,
Gallup put forward three types of employees (Krueger & Killham, 2006):
Engaged employees work with passion and feel profound connection to their
company. They drive innovation and move the company forward. © 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 7 of 9
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