Introduction
Employee engagement entails an approach that provides the appropriate conditions for corporation members so that they can give out their best every day, remain motivated to obtaining the firm’s success, develop a sense of self-accomplishment, and remain committed to the values and goals of the enterprise. The workplace concept is based on commitment, integrity, community, and trust between the business and its members. It is an initiative that enhances the chances of organizational success, well-being and productivity, and individual and firm outcomes. The approach gives the workers the motivation to wake up each morning and get to work. They also develop a clearer perspective on how the business works and their roles in the enterprise. The personnel feels like they are part of a team that it empowered with vivid objectives and constructive feedback. This essay progresses the ideology of employee engagement by evaluating the ideas provided by several authors concerning the concept.
Body
Annet De Lange and Mathijs Bal evaluate the role of human resource management in the provision of employee engagement. The article looks at the impacts of the flexibility of the department of human resource management in enhancing the workers’ outcomes. The authors develop their hypothesis by using two theories: AMO Approach and the Work Adjustment Theory. The two models suggest that the flexibility of human resource management operations has a positive effect on the employee’s performance and engagement. The article also postulates various hypotheses regarding the age of the personnel. The generation theory provides that younger staff react faster to engagement practices. The compensation and optimization theory, on the other hand, predicts that the older employees respond better to engagement. Amongst the older workers, the workplace practice improves their performance while in the younger individuals it increases their response to employee engagement (Mathijs and De Lange, 2014, 127).
The study procured by Annet and Bal is particularly crucial as the world faces changes in demographic compositions. Some of the variations include the emergence of the baby boomer generation due to the reduced birth rates and increased life expectancy rates. The change has purposed the retention of older staff by incorporating employee engagement. The results of Annet and Bal’s research are acceptable universally because they use samples from America as well as other sections in the world. The analysis verifies the essence of flexibility in the organization in improving the workers’ productivity and engagement (Mathijs and De Lange, 2014). Chia-Chun Hsieh and Dan-Shang Wang evaluate a different alternative of employee engagement from Annet and Bal. In their research, they relate the concept to the presence of authentic leadership. They also incorporate the issue of the staff’s trust in the firm. Their article scores 386 laborers in the top-ranking corporations in the country of Taiwan.
Hsieh and Wang utilize a hierarchical multidimensional regression to verify their hypotheses. The outcomes provide that the supervisor’s consistency in actions and words together with the ethical assertions are correlated with employee engagement. The leaders’ activities are also associated with the development of trust amongst the workers. Employee trust increases the laborers’ engagement. Hence, the trust of the personnel acts as a mediating factor between engagement and authentic management. The global entrepreneurial environment today is changing rapidly. With the variations come turbulent and challenging issues as well as moral meltdowns. The research done by Hsieh and Wang indicates the importance of leaders who have a directive or purpose, can create stable work surroundings, motivate laborers to provide better services to buyers, and possess integrity and strong values. Authenticity and integrity are two fundamental elements in society. By examining the relationship between the two values and engagement, the authors find a way of introducing the community’s most valuable skills into the organization (Wang and Hsieh, 2013, 614).
However, Hsieh and Wang’s analysis has several limitations. First, they adopt the same techniques to collect and analyze data concerning the two variables: employee engagement and trust. The utilization of a similar technique can create a common variance anomaly. The writers also base their assumption on the perspectives of the staff resulting in the same level of artificialness. They leave room for future research to personalize and customize the effects of authentic leadership and provide more culturally-related indicators (Wang and Hsieh, 2013). Peter Sorensen and Therese Yaeger look at the different mechanism of enhancing employee engagement. Their article develops a case study that acts as a learning example. The appropriate execution of employee engagement is vital to the members of the corporation and improves their motivation to obtain the enterprise’s objectives. For the manager to systematically incorporate the value of employee engagement into the organization’s procedures and culture, he or she must first explore the previous operations of the business. The evaluation will provide indications of where the company is lacking and improve or formulate new ways to implement personnel engagement (Yaeger and Sorensen, 2016, 49).
In most firms, the engagement of employees is fundamental to their unit performance. The senior leadership must be responsible for assigning resources to the workplace practice and keep track of relevant feedback. They should also emphasis on the need for employee engagement in the firm to obtain support from all the stakeholders. After that, the management should provide fact-based analysis or plan that will portray the linkage between the organization’s outcomes and personnel engagement. Once the senior executives are aligned and focus on executing the workplace practice, the firm should develop a robust channel for communications. The interactions will promote the awareness concerning the importance of employee engagement and communicate the proposed activities to acquire feedback from the staff. The firm can even go ahead and form a team of workers who will evaluate the areas that present the largest impacts and opportunities to the organizations. After that, the leadership should focus on improving the operations that have been identified by the employees. The mechanisms provided by Sorensen and Yaeger are just a tip of the icing. The methods can work for certain corporations, but it would be wise first to evaluate all the available studies on implementing personnel engagement before settling for one (Yaeger and Sorensen, 2016, 50).
Richard Roof finds an interesting way of developing the concept of employee engagement by addressing the issue of the spirituality in the workplace. He creates a relationship between job spirituality and engagement. However, the theories are still in their early stages hence much has not been brought up by scholars regarding them. The emerging studies have proven that there is a positive correlation between spirituality, engagement, and the organizational performance. Roof responds to the call to increase the scope of knowledge regarding the two concepts by instituting a cross-sectional analysis that evaluates self-spirituality using the personnel engagement and DSES. The ideology is measured through several dimensions such as absorption, dedication, and vigor. The author incorporates information from 124 surveys that adopt the snowballing sampling technique. The analysis provided by roof covers the gap that exists in employee engagement and spirituality concepts in relation to the outcomes of a corporation. The two theories have evolved independently, but the author finds a way to develop a link between them. Spirituality measures the workers’ values and emotions concerning the job and the environment. It also identifies how the laborers higher order requirements can be accomplished (Roof, 2015, 586).
The enhanced attention towards employee spirituality and engagement is driven by the recognition of cultural dynamics within the firm. Cultural perceptions have also been associated with enlightened management and leadership models, increasing materialism, and ethical considerations. By adopting personnel engagement and spirituality, executives formulate a more humanistic surrounding in the firm that considers the personal values of the laborers. Roof’s study is fundamental in establishing a corporation culture that promotes wellness, meaningfulness, and positive psychology (Roof, 2015, 596). However, the research possesses a similar limitation to the one exhibited in Wan and Hsieh’s study concerning common variance. Roof also depends too much on the beliefs of the workers. All in all, the analysis identifies and addresses an unexplored field in business management. Gerald Plumlee, Kenneth Green, and Christie Hough develop a relationship between employee engagement and ethics as well as organizational trust. Based on their evaluation, the primary antecedents in personnel engagement are attributed as trust and morality. Their analysis is also the first in the field of ethics and trust to focus of employee engagement and better firm performance. The authors identify that the trust in the enterprise mediates the link between employee engagement and the ethical surrounding. Their analysis shows that being ethical can have several positive impacts on the business (Hough, et.al, 2015, 45).
Most enterprises penetrate the commercial world to obtain profits; hence, they resort to illegal and unethical mechanisms of increasing their revenue. However, today’s corporate environment has taken a sudden dislike to immoral entrepreneurial activities. Companies are being exposed daily for unethical operations, and they immediately lose their followers and buyers in the process. Aside from ethics assisting in building a good image and reputation for the firm, the writers say that it improves the trust amongst the personnel and their work engagement. They feel proud and motivated to serve a firm that has concrete moral standpoints. While the authors’ views are a crucial expansion to current literature, they have some substantial limitations. The desirable ethics amongst human beings can be different with others exhibiting a significant level of bias to certain perspectives. Morality is a contentious field since no one exactly knows what is wrong or right specifically. The research techniques adopted also poses their disadvantages. For instance, the questionnaire’s length may not have been suitable for those who lose interest quickly. It required individuals to sacrifice 20 minutes of their attention to answering the queries. Most respondents who began that study did not finish it. The authors’ evaluation requests management to put more focus on organizational trust and ethics as contributors towards personnel engagement (Hough, et.al, 2015).
Conclusion
The thorough review provides essential factors that improve or favor employee engagement such as authentic leadership, trust, and ethics. It also provides a chronological procedure of instituting the work practice into the business surroundings. Though each study had its limitations, the writers collectively focus on an upcoming resource that will enhance the outcomes of the corporations. Firms that choose to adopt personnel engagement may end up creating a source of competitive advantage that will set them aside from their rivals. However, the concept cannot be implemented without the cooperation of the management to set aside their short-term profit driven desires and focus on building long-term pathways for success.
References
Hough C. et.al (2015). Impacts of Ethics Environmental and Organizational Trust on Employee Engagement. Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, Volume 18, Number 3.
Mathijs B. and De Lange A., 2014. From flexibility human resource management to employee engagement and perceived job performance across the lifespan: A multi sample study. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88, 126–154.
Roof R. A., 2015. The Association of Individual Spirituality on Employee Engagement: The Spirit at Work. J Bus Ethics 130:585–599.
Wang D. and Hsieh C., 2013. The Effect of Authentic Leadership on Employee Trust and Employee Engagement. Social Behavior and Personality, 613-624.
Yaeger T. and Sorensen P., 2016. Enhancing Employee Engagement Efforts. OD Practitioner, Volume 48, No. 2.
