Exploring The Essence, Features, And Mechanism Of Employee Engagement

How employees engage themselves at work affect their work experience and performance,and also the performance of their organizations. This research aims to explore the employeeengagement phenomena with focus on its essence, the differences and relations between roleengagement and task engagement, the descriptive characteristics and mechanisms of roleengagement.With regard to the current employee engagement research state of having diverging andeven conflicting conceptualizations and theoretical frameworks with lack of distinctionbetween task engagement and role engagement, this research adopts the phenomenologicalresearch methodology, and aims to explore the employee engagement phenomena withouttheoretical assumptions. By using semi-structured in-depth interviews to collect informants’narrative of their lived working experiences, this reseach explores the essence of theemployee engagement phenomena, the descriptive characteristics and psychologicalmechanisms of the role engagement phenomena. Using the purposeful theorectical samplingmethods of extreme, multi-category and nestling cases of case-study research,70informantsworking on different job positions such as technicians, administrators, secretary, clerks, andteachers at two private colleges and two private companies located in Guangdong Provincewere interviewed during three waves of data collection between July and December in2011.Based on qualitative data analysis and reiteration between data and literature, constructs andtheory are defined and proposed.The essential meaning of the engagement construct is analyzed, and the definition byKahn (1990), which is the seminal paper of employee engagement research, is reevaluatedand then a redefinition of engagement is proposed with the addition of a new form ofengagement. By applying intention theory and self-determination theory of psychology, theessential elements of engagement and their relations are analyzed and the new construct ofengagement commitment is proposed. The differences and relations of task engagement androle engagement are distinguished, and the conceptual boundaries of major currentengagement conceptualizations are defined. Based on qualitative data analysis, roleengagement strategy typology model and role performance typology model are proposed toreflect the descriptive characteristics of the role engagement phenomena. By applying roletheory, identification theory, self-regulatory theory and self-regulation theory to explainingthe mechanisms of role engagement phenomena, static and dynamic models of roleengagement are proposed. The followings are the main findings of this research: The engagement construct is abehavior construct reflecting whether employees are willing to perform their work and howthey invest their time and efforts at work, and can be divided in the three pure forms ofself-engagement, self-disengagement, and self counter-engagement. Engagement commitmentis a motive construct reflecting whether employees are self-committed to do their work welland to make efforts for it, and can be divided into the three forms of self-engagementcommitment, self-engagement noncommitment, and self counter-engagement commitment.Engagement commitment is the proximal antecedent of employee engagement behavior, andthus has major effect on the latter. Task engagement and role engagement are two related butdistinct phenomena of different levels with role engagement more stable than taskengagement and thus more representative of employee work engagement. Employees’ roleengagement strategy is both affected by role engagement commitment and the referent roleexpectations, and thus can be divided into a typology of self-oriented role engagementstrategies and normative role engagement strategies. Similarly, role performance can bedivided in the two categories of conformant and non conformant role performance. The basicmechanism of role engagement can be depicted by a model consisting self perception, rolerelation perception, role identification, role engagement commitment, role engagementstrategy, and role performance, with regulatory locus as a moderator. When realizing theimpossibility in fulfilling self-goals in role interaction, employees can adjust their self-goalsand consequently realign the perception, attitudes, and behavior to meet environmentdemands and satisfy their own needs.