I’m a big fan of the concept of employee engagement but I’ve also been very skeptical of how both big consultants and my own academic community have treated it so far. We’ve been told to believe that the link between engagement and profitability is a slam dunk, but because of poor research design, this very difficult cause-effect link has really never been established.
I’m very happy to say that a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal provides the best credible evidence so far for a link between psychological engagement and employee performance. The article is entitled “Job Engagement: Antecedents and Effects on Job Performance,” by Bruce Rich, Jeffrey LePine, and Eean Crawford.
This well designed study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors found that job engagement was a significant predictor of both task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). This is especially significant because job engagement was tested for its affect on performance and OCB simultaneously with job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation. In the presence of job engagement, these other important factors lost their significance.
The researchers defined job engagement as “a multidimensional motivational concept reflecting the simultaneous investment of an individual’s physical, cognitive, and emotional energy in active, full work performance” (p. 619). A simple way to remember this is “engagement involves investing the hands, head, and heart in active, full work performance” (p. 619). Most importantly, this research gives us a new measure of engagement that is in my opinion the best available. This new measure of job engagement has 18 questions, 6 for each of the sub-dimensions of engagement: physical engagement (e.g. I exert my full effort to my job), emotional engagement (e.g. I feel energetic at my job), and cognitive engagement (At work, I focus a great deal of attention on my job). Because this measure is non-proprietary, I predict we are going to see it used in a lot of research in the future, so our knowledge of a consistent conceptualization and measurement of job engagement is only going to get better.
They also identified three antecedents of job engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations, such that higher levels of these were associated with higher levels of job engagement. An important take-away is that the process of job engagement is heavily influenced by the selection process. Look for employees with an internal locus of control, self-esteem (but not hubris), self-efficacy, and emotional stability. Be transparent about your organizational values and look for people that can help you enhance those values. To further enhance value congruence, provide mentoring, socialization opportunities, and management practices that align with your stated values. Finally, demonstrate support for the development of your employees by providing leadership training and meaningful developmental performance feedback. There is no recipe for engagement or performance, but these three tips are a good place to start.
This still does not prove that a company that does a better job of engaging its employees will outperform one that does not. That is very hard to establish; however, every organization should be focused like a laser on employee performance, and this research suggests that job engagement may be a significant key to performance.
And please don’t miss the fact that you can’t get engagement with wishful thinking. You get it with carefully designed selection, training, support, and performance feedback systems. If you find yourself lamenting that your employees don’t appear engaged, you are going to have to do something different.
Related posts:
You should follow me on twitter here.
Ironic, I just sent you an email about engagement and referenced the Q12…I guess now we’ll all be doing research with the E18.
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 19th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
It is a MUCH better measure, David. We needed something like this. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
De'Andre Barnes Reply:
August 21st, 2010 at 3:21 pm
The definition you quoted from the authors is incorrect. The definition you provided is from Kahn’s point of view, not the researchers. The researcher’s definition is located at the bottom of page 619 and carries over to the next column. I do not mean to be overly-analytic; I simply wanted to clarify the article’s position.
De’Andre
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
August 21st, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Welcome, De’Andre! You are quite correct and the authors of the research article quote Kahn extensively. I looked at the bottom of p 619 and what I found there was the construct definition of performance. I’m glad you read the AMJ article – I really liked it. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
Very timely. I just saw The Leader Lab post this on Twitter at the same time I clicked ‘publish’ on my blog “You’re a Project Manager Not A Robot”. I went on to say that we need to learn the pushed and pulls of our team members and if we can ‘get them’ then the project templates and tasks will get done.
This adds some depth and I am going to update the blog to add this post as a link. Great stuff!
-Robert
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 9:42 am
Welcome, Robert. Agree 100% that our responsibility as managers is to learn how we can better enable our workers to do their best work. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
Hi Bret, interesting! Any idea how I can get a copy of the article? I live outside the US. But I am verry interested in the subject. Thanks in advance.
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 9:43 am
Welcome, Eric. Do you subscribe to a local library? My university library has a subscription to AMJ so copies are free to everyone. Not sure what else to tell you. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
Bret: Thanks for today’s posting and the reference to sound research. In my post of 7/20, http://www.heartofengagement.com ,I’ll be sending my readership your way. Can you tell me whether it is possible to get a copy of the paper you cited without being a member of the Academy of Management Journal?
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Welcome, Mike. Thanks for your comment as well as the post at your site! I thought it was excellent. I especially like and totally agree that engagement is everyone’s responsibility. Thanks!! Bret
[Reply]
I would add, Bret, that employee engagement is a daily activity for managers, and that it must be directly linked to the unit’s purpose (why it exists) and overall organizational mission.
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 7:55 am
Absolutely concur with that philosophy, Jim. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
You stated that the assessment was non-proprietary; any way to access that?
Thanks,
Duane
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:54 am
If you can’t get it through your local library, then google the first author and send an e-mail requesting a copy. This works for me most of the time. Thanks! Bret
[Reply]
Bret, thanks for posting this. However I respectfully have to disagree with your conclusions and comments about engagement and performance. There are many articles which have made the morale/engagement and performance connection before this one, and several of them based on far, far greater numbers of study participants than this. There is even a whole book filled with these, which I just happen to have written!
With only 245 people in this study I would be careful to recommend that others dump their Q-12 or any other measure they find useful. Even though I am not a huge fan of the Q-12, it was at least created based on responses from millions of people at work and was heavily validated over many years. Gallup has very smart people. They also found early on (Harter et al, 2002) that job satisfaction and engagement were equally capable of predicting organization performance, so I would not jump to any quick conclusions about that from this small firefighter study either.
As for your statement that “This still does not prove that a company that does a better job of engaging its employees will outperform one that does not”….well maybe this study does not, which limits its usefulness significantly, but again, I totally disagree with you that other studies have not proved this, as will Gallup, Prof. Ed Lawler and many others.
David
http://www.moraleatwork.com
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
August 7th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Welcome, David! I too have to respectfully disagree with you. Gallup has NOT proven that engagement does all the magic stuff they claim it does, because they cannot! The do not measure engagement, they measure the causes of engagement. Go back and re-read those Harter studies very carefully and they even admit what it is they are measuring. In the end, they call their measure one of engagement but at best it is a proxy. As a scientist, I stand by my claim that most of the research on engagement has fundamental measurement flaws that make the conclusions unsupportable.
I’d encourage you to get the study I reference and take a close look at it.
Thanks!
Bret
[Reply]
Hi Bret,
I may be a little behind reading this post and I would like to add a comment.
While working for the Marriott for 4 years, they utilized the Gallup to measure employee engagement. The questions asked were the Q12 plus several questions specifically customized for the Marriott. The survey was given each Spring and Fall.
I hear what you are saying questioning the direct impact measurement of employee engagement on effectiveness and productivity. The Marriott did keep measurement statistics to show improvements. Unfortunately I do not personally have the stats to share with you.
And like any tool used, if used properly with the right spirit of intent, I believe you can impact performance results.
I developed a debriefing process for our department to gain additional insights from our associates on their responses. This process allowed us to obtain specific input especially in the categories that were considered low. We would then create action plans to work on improving in those areas and communicate the progress monthly to the associates. And, of course, the progress or lack of improvement on the topics was measured again in 6 months.
My theory is by the associates having belief and trusting that their feedback was taken seriously and their feedback caused improvement in their working conditions helped them to feel the management team invested in them by utilizing and acting on the information they shared. They were not only a part of the team, they were an integral part of helping the organization develop and grow from the inside out.
This process also created an environment where the associates could speak the truth about their reality of the situation with their bosses. And the old saying, “People don’t quit jobs, they leave bad bosses” is very true. I enjoyed facilitating these sessions and observing the relationships and lines of communication improve between managers and associates as a result of this engagement survey process. In my opinion when lines of communication are enhanced you have a better opportunity to impact and improve performance.
Thanks for the opportunity to share my observations and opinion.
Clare
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
August 8th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Welcome, Clare! I appreciate your insightful comment. The Q12 should give managers very good information on how to make changes to the environment to improve employee relations. Unfortunately, I think if you ask employees in Q12 systems their opinion of the effectiveness of the approach you get different answers than if you ask managers. Most employees I’ve spoken to think that particular system was a charade. What they really learned, as much as anything, was how to answer the survey so that they did not get heat from the boss. Many still worked in high turnover systems that were not necessarily doing a good job of impressing either employees or customers.
Thanks for sharing! Hope to see more of your comments.
Bret
[Reply]
Hi Bret,
Thanks for the Welcome! Great to become a part of your tribe!
And to your comments, I can see how the Q12 could certainly be implemented by organizations as the program of the month to appear to onboard with employee engagement. And, I can appreciate your comment about how associates answer the questions so they don’t get into trouble.
As you well know, when you are working in an environment where there are low levels of trust, you are just going to play the game and lay low.
Fortunately, the people I was working with at the time took the process seriously as a method to grow and improve. We held sessions with associates to make sure they understood the questions they were going to be asked and helped them to clearly know whom they would be rating so the results could be as meaningful as possible.
And then, as we both know, if you do nothing with the results and input from the associates, it is worse than not asking them for their opinion at all. So, the follow-through process was a critical piece to the success for us. It created such unique dialogues around topics even if it was to debate the usefulness and true application of some of the questions asked in the Q12.
All-in-all for us, it was a useful tool. I learned a lot from it. I would inject a question from the Q12 into my weekly meetings with my managers to enrich the dialogue instead of our meeting being strictly about the usual information that sometimes comes off as, “What have you done for me lately?”
It is always fun to provoke thought and create meaningful dialogue. Thanks for providing this forum to do just that.
Clare
[Reply]
Bret L. Simmons Reply:
August 10th, 2010 at 7:15 am
Once again, Clare, I appreciate your insight. Let me challenge you with this – just like I’ve never met an employee that liked the system, I’ve also rarely met a manager that did not describe how well they themselves were using it. Those employees that did not like the system belonged to “other” managers, not them. A system like Q12 costs LOTS of money, so it is usually tied to real consequences for the manager. In those environments, power and pressure creep in even if we think we have the best intentions. Thanks for sharing! Bret
[Reply]