Dynamic Measurement of Employee Engagement and the Relationship with Job Performanc

Employee engagement originally gained popularity among practitioners in their efforts to improve organizational measures of performance. The attention has turned to employee engagement as a means of facilitating improvement in individual performance outcomes, with the expectation that individual performance improvements will also improve organizational performance. However, with conceptual and definitional inconsistencies between practitioners and researchers, the construct of employee engagement requires further study to refine the construct and its relationship with job performance. This study provides a review of the literature to clarify the construct of employee engagement. Next, a dynamic measurement of the change in employee engagement and its relationship with outcome variables is tested. Evidence supporting a curvilinear relationship between employee engagement and job performance is presented. Specifically, employee engagement scores that were similar between two time points corresponded to higher job performance ratings and dissimilar scores corresponded to lower job performance ratings. Change in employee engagement scores also corresponded to intentions to leave the organization. Contributions to existing literature, implications for research and practice, and directions for future research are discussed.