New evidence for both employee empowerment and employee engagement shows that these concepts merit your consideration as you are given the privilege or otherwise find opportunities to be a leader at work. Both empowerment and engagement produce outcomes that you better be zealous about – job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and individual as well as team performance.

You must provide your employees meaningful work if you want to have any chance of getting them to feel either engaged or empowered. Given that you have designed significant jobs for all your employees, are you sure your employees clearly understand how what they do on a daily basis really matters to the success of the organization? How do you know that they know?

Make sure your employees understand and value the larger purpose in their work – why what they do really matters. If as a leader you are not doing this for your folks, then I wonder if you really understand what it means to be a leader.

Meaningless work is a sure sign of meaningless leadership.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Related Posts:

You Will Lead The Same Way You Follow, So Be Careful How You Follow

Leadership Development: The Foundation

The Process Of Managerial Leadership

Engagement is a psychological response an employee has to the job that motivates the employee to invest his or her whole self – head, hands, and heart – to work. Valid measures of engagement tap characteristics of the response, not characteristics of the work itself. “I feel energetic,” is an example of a valid engagement question, while “I have a best friend at work” is not. One is about the response; the other is about what might cause the response.

One acceptable way to measure engagement is Dr. Arie Shriom’s Vigor Scale. Shriom defines vigor as the positive feeling of physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness that arises in response to an individual’s evaluation of the work that they do. It’s not my favorite way to measure engagement, but it works.

A study recently published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (full citation at the end of this post) found that employee vigor was a significant predictor of organizational citizenship behavior. Good organizational citizens go above and beyond what’s written in their job descriptions to either help others at work or to improve the functioning of the organization. Mediocrity is the best your organization can expect to achieve if your employees do not exhibit good citizenship behavior.

This study of 331 repair generalists in a large building facilities and maintenance organization also showed that a personality trait called attachment style was a significant predictor of vigor. Individuals are characterized as having either a secure, counterdependent, or overdependent attachment style.

Individuals with secure attachment form healthy, reciprocal relationships with people. They can work well autonomously but also know when and how to call on others for help when needed. Counterdependent folks avoid close relationships and tend to push others away, even when they need help. Overdepenent folks cling to others and seek more support than they need, which results in driving others away.

As predicted, people with a secure attachment style were more likely to experience vigor at work, while individuals with either a counterdependent or overdependent style experienced less vigor. I think we can conclude that if we value employee engagement, we need to try to hire people with a secure, interdependent attachment style. In my own research, I’ve found that individuals with a secure attachment style had a more trusting relationship with their supervisor, and that trust was a significant predictor of employee performance.

Vigor is a valid way to think about engagement. If your employees appear peppy, energetic, and interested in the work they do, they are likely engaged. If this does not describe your employees, you could certainly look for new ones, but I’d recommend starting with partnering with them to continuously improve the work that they do.

Full citation: Little, L.M, et al. (2011) Integrating attachment style, vigor at work, and extra-role performance, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32: 464-484.

Related Posts:

Interpersonal Citizenship Behavior: My Most Recent Research

Authentic Leadership

Measurement Happens

The evidence for work engagement got a big boost from a study just published in Personnel Psychology (full citation at the end of this post). The authors first defined what engagement is and is not, identified several key antecedents and consequences, and then tested their model in a meta-analysis of 200 previously published studies of six different measures of engagement that met their criteria.

I was disappointed that the authors did not provide a concise definition of engagement. In their two page definition of engagement (darn academics), they do identify two characteristics that must be present in any valid approach to work engagement (pp. 91- 94):

1.     Engagement should refer to a psychological connection with the performance of work tasks rather than features of the job or organization. “Thus, a measure such as the Gallup Workplace Audit does not conform to this conceptualization because it refers to work conditions not the work task” (p. 91). Did you catch that? Gallup does NOT measure engagement – something I’ve stated here previously.

2.     Engagement involves the simultaneous and holistic self-investment of physical, emotional, and cognitive resources to work. Engaged folks experience a connection with their work on multiple levels.

The results of the meta-analysis first showed that work engagement predicts work performance over and above job satisfaction and organizational commitment – the two most consistent predictors of performance. The effect of engagement beyond satisfaction and commitment is not large, but it is significant.

Both characteristics of the job and characteristics of the individual are significant predictors of work engagement. The characteristics of the job that enhance engagement are task variety and task significance, and the characteristics of the individual are conscientiousness and positive affect. An interesting finding of the study was that autonomy, feedback, and transformational leadership have little effect on employee engagement.

Good quality evidence is mounting that work engagement does matter. Please understand that this conclusion is only valid if you have defined and measured engagement correctly. There are a lot of very popular measures of engagement being peddled by consultants (e.g. Gallup) that cannot claim support from this evidence. And please keep in mind that if engagement is not your cup of tea, this research confirmed once again that good old employee satisfaction and commitment are still some of the best drivers of employee performance.

If you want engaged employees at your workplace, you must first assume responsibility for providing jobs that give employees the opportunity to perform a variety of tasks that they perceive to be meaningful. It’s very difficult for employees to be engaged when their jobs are mundane and they have not been shown how what they do really matters. With good jobs in place, now hire conscientious and positive employees. Please don’t miss the fact that unless and until you make informed decisions as a manager, employee engagement will remain elusive.

Full citation: Christian, M.S., Garza, A.S., & Slaughter, J.E. (2011) Work engagement: A quantitative review and test of its relations with task and contextual performance. Personnel Psychology, 64: 89-136.

Related Posts:

Engagement Soup

Are We Engaged Yet?

Respectful Engagement

With Valentine’s Day just a heartbeat away, this post about the passion of work is probably not what you might expect. I hope everyone finds a job someday that they love and want to devote themselves to; however, too many of us experience a different passion at work.

Passion originated as a term to convey suffering. The passion of work for many of us is more about patience and fortitude than it is about vigor and absorption.

The passion of crappy work or a lousy boss can transform you if you let it. The persistent pressure can make you hard, bitter, and resistant, or it can make you soft, detached, and abused.

You don’t have to allow the passion to transform you. You can instead resolve to assume responsibility for trying to partner with others at work to transform the causes of your suffering. Don’t wait to be invited, and don’t expect to be applauded.

Give yourself permission to devote your head, hands, and heart to continuously improving your capacity to continuously improve the systems that drive the work that you do and choose to supplant your passion with purpose.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Related Posts:

Enablement

Leadership Integrity, Value Congruence, And Employee Engagement

The Responsibility For Self-Engagement

I’m very pleased to share with you the following guest post by David Burkus over at The Leader Lab. David hosts my guest posts at his site and it is high time I reciprocated the honor. Thanks, David!

Quantum physics and employee engagement share a common dilemma: measurement is tricky. Quantum entanglement represents the paradox that when two systems have interacted, measuring one will inevitably bring both into a state of collapse. Erwin Schrodinger related this bizarre phenomenon to the analogy of a cat in a sealed box where the cat’s life is dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. The particle may or may not have collapsed, but opening the box to check (measurement) would certainly collapse the particle and kill the cat. (I’m allergic to cats and so have always been attracted to this theorem). Since the state of the particle, and the cat, cannot be verified without destroying both, the cat must be said to be both alive and dead. Measurement is impossible, since curiosity truly kills the cat.

What does any of this have to do with engagement?

Consultants and academics alike swoon at the concept of employee engagement. Some view it as a salve for burnout; others as a tried formula for developing the most productive workforce. However, just like Schrodinger’s cat, measurement is tricky. The most common predictor of engagement is the Q12, developed and licensed by the Gallop Organization. This twelve question survey measures elements of the work environment that predict engagement, but does not measure engagement itself. A newer instrument, which I lovingly call the E18 measures engagement itself, but is still not exempt from a basic human truth: people lie.

Suppose you don’t believe your survey results are actually confidential. Would you admit to being bored, burned out and ineffective at work? Or, suppose measurement is being used as an assessment of your manager. If you like your manager (or your job), you’ll magically be engaged (on paper) when you might actually be experiencing burnout. My favorite: suppose this is the second or third time you’ve been given the Q12. You’ll likely score yourself as more engaged in the hopes of being exempt from future surveys and the management interventions that follow.

None of these scenarios actually help to improve the engagement of people in an organization. Moreover, frequently measuring the levels of engagement in a workforce is likely to create an annoyance and decrease engagement itself.

Perhaps curiosity kills engagement as well.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab, a community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor of business at several universities. He can be reached at david@davidburkus.com.

Related Posts:

Are We Engaged Yet?

Measurement Happens

Emotional Intelligence At Work: Choose And Apply Your Measure Carefully

“Are we there yet?” If you have kids and have ever taken them anywhere in a car, no doubt you’ve heard this before. I promise you, if work for an organization that is on an employee engagement program turnpike, your employees are thinking something very similar. They all know it, but you probably do not.

If I read another blog post with an 8 step formula on how to engage  employees at work, I think I will puke. There is no simple formula for anything at work, especially something as complex as engagement.

Instead of searching for solutions to poorly defined problems you assume exist, start instead with asking good questions. Let me suggest a few:

1.      What does it mean to be engaged?

2.      Why does it matter?

3.      How do you know what it means and why it matters?

4.      Are you engaged?

How can you hope to ever engage your employees unless and until you have a clear understanding of what engagement might be? And if you are not engaged with your work, do you really believe your employees can’t tell or that it’s irrelevant?

I like the concept of engagement as investing your hands, head, and heart in active, full work performance. I am willing to bet that very few people you know, including yourself, can say this is true about every hour of every day of their own work. Even if this does happen for you daily, it most likely occurs only a few times during the day and with intensity for only relatively brief periods of time.

We know from our personal experience that engagement can be very enjoyable, but let’s be real here. If we did somehow manage to be fully engaged most of the time at work, we’d be physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. In case you don’t recognize that, it’s called burnout.

I love the concept of work engagement, but as I’ve said many times before, the engagement hype far exceeds the high quality, peer-reviewed evidence. I know it may be heresy in some workplaces, but it’s OK to be skeptical about engagement right now. Use some common sense and think through the answers to a few important questions about your own engagement before you engage your employees with efforts to improve theirs.

Be honest with yourself and your employees – we are not there yet. Not even close.

Related Posts:

Engagement: Cause Or Effect?

Leadership Integrity, Value Congruence, And Employee Engagement

Perceived Organizational Support And Employee Engagement

Guest Post by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

Over the last few years, our series of business books has focused on “carrots,” our catch-phrase for recognition offered by leaders to appreciate the great work of their employees. And yet in a new 350,000-person study, we learned that the same practices of appreciation and recognition that create great leaders also contribute to the success of breakthrough teams.

Here’s what we found: Cheering is the secret sauce that can create a spirit of camaraderie so strong that the act of supporting each other becomes second nature, where the vast majority of pettiness and finger-pointing stops. And it was appreciation (or recognition) that was the key cheering factor that unlocked commitment, drive, and ultimately, success. As team member talents and efforts were rewarded frequently and specifically, colleagues also strove for the same treatment. They wanted a bit of cheer too.

Sounds good, right? But what if your cheering was under scrutiny from the Wall Street media?

We found that’s just what happened recently at Texas Roadhouse, a restaurant chain with 330 locations and 40,000 employees system-wide. The restaurants were built to resemble a traditional roadhouse found throughout rural Texas, serving great food amid line dancing and country music.

Company founder Kent Taylor opened the doors on his first restaurant in 1993 with a simple people-first philosophy; take care of your employees and they will take care of your guests. His focus on employee happiness was a departure from the conventional management wisdom at a time when competitors were focused solely on taking care of the guest. In this remarkable culture, awards were created for meat cutters, bartenders, and even line dancers. Other national promotions and contests combine for a line-up of employee recognition that is impressive.

It’s an approach that recently earned Texas Roadhouse careful attention from the press. Recently at the company’s annual managing partner conference, CEO G.J. Hart was invited on air by CNBC to discuss the company’s decision to continue recognition practices. While media focus at the time was critical of using company resources to celebrate in a time of rampant economic cutbacks, Hart used the opportunity to create a rallying cry for Texas Roadhouse employees.

Read the words of Service Manager Wendy Ennis of the Clarksville, Indiana, restaurant, as she described to us Hart’s appearance on the news network: “The whole interview was pretty incredible. Not only did GJ not apologize for celebrating his people’s accomplishments, he said he wasn’t sure it was enough. It’s an honor to be a part of a company that’s so committed to taking care of its people—especially now. At a time when most companies are saying, ‘Don’t love your people, don’t do anything extra, just tighten the belt as much as you can,’ it’s almost as if our leadership does just the opposite. The message we get is, ‘Take care of your people especially right now. Love your guests especially right now. Take care of your community especially right now.’ And you know what? The guests tell us they can feel it too and they love it.”

By continually engaging employees through a platform of consistent appreciation, Texas Roadhouse has inspired such employee commitment, not to mention stronger performance and customer loyalty, all of which contribute to better business results. “We have seen a double digit drop in turnover from just a year ago,” says Dave Dodson, communication and recognition program director.

Other company metrics also speak to the success of the Texas Roadhouse’s approach to culture. In 2009, again during the recession, company earnings were at record levels.

The moral of the story: Texas Roadhouse is one of many great examples that illustrate the power of cheering in this economy. Despite the doom and gloom, there is potential in every team to be extraordinary.

New York Times bestselling authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton are the authors of The Orange Revolution: How one great team can transform an entire organization coming Sept. 20 from Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Learn more at carrots.com. Subscribe to Adrian and Chester’s blogs at http://adriangostick.com and http://chesterelton.com

Thanks, Adrian and Chester! Bret

Are some people more likely to be engaged at work than others?

Yes, according to recent research. An important new study with the best evidence yet that employee engagement might indeed facilitate performance also suggests that value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluation (CSE) might be engagement enhancers.

Core self-evaluation is a personality trait that represents an individual’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and locus of control. Employees with a positive CSE had previously been shown to perform better, deal with adverse conditions, and just be more satisfied at work then those with a negative CSE.

This new link between CSE and engagement is significant because it’s the only suggested cause of engagement that a company or supervisor cannot directly control. Personality is relatively stable – we can’t change people’s personality at work so we shouldn’t even try.

The obvious suggestion from this new research on engagement is that we should try to hire people with a positive CSE. That’s easier said than done because the most common selection tool is an interview, and according to Robert Hogan, narcissists and psychopaths excel at interviews. Unfortunately, I find that most people do not even know how to recognize personality and distinguish it from other psychological states like attitudes, emotions, moods, and values. That is a big problem.

I like to listen for internal locus of control (LOC) and healthy self-esteem.

Someone with a healthy self-esteem can speak in a matter-of-fact way about both their strengths and weaknesses. They don’t embellish their strengths and don’t feel threatened to admit a weakness. They believe their strengths far exceed their weaknesses, and they pursue a strategy of exposing themselves to situations where they can excel and avoiding situations where they know they can’t contribute significant value.

Individuals with an internal LOC have a characteristic tendency to assume responsibility for the things that happen to them. Individuals with a more external LOC will always find something or someone else to blame when things go wrong. People with an internal LOC can see the systemic causes of their behavior, but they assume responsibility for taking action to change those causes so they don’t experience the same failure over and over again.  They don’t dump on their leaders (this sucks and so do you!); instead, they partner with them to fix the crappy system that was the main cause of the problem.

Do your best to hire, retain, and promote employees with a positive CSE. Learn what they value at work, and never expect them to behave in ways that would violate those values. Demonstrate your respect and care for them as individuals through interdependent relationships and supportive management practices.

This is a reasonable path to employee engagement. If you find yourself making excuses or blaming employees for their lack of engagement, take an honest look in the mirror at your own personality.

Related Posts:

Secure Attachment: Another Positive Personality Trait

The Importance Of Understanding Personalities And Attitudes

I Can Empathize With Others That Are Also Imperfect

A few days ago I blogged about how recent research suggests that value congruence – the extent to which employees can behave at work consistent with their own self-image – might enhance employee engagement. Employees are just not likely to fully invest their head, hands, and hearts in work they don’t find meaningful.

But employees also need to believe their work is manageable. This recent research also showed a link between perceived organizational support and engagement.

Individuals feel safe in organizational contexts perceived to be trustworthy, secure, predictable, and clear in terms of behavioral consequences….Individuals with trusting interpersonal relationships in supportive organizational environments are able to take risks, expose their real selves, and try and perhaps fail without fearing the consequences (Kahn, 1990)…Thus, supportive management and interpersonal relationships foster feelings of psychological safety that increases willingness to engage fully in work roles. (Rich, et al. 2010, p. 621).

Just to be clear, let me show you some of the questions the researchers asked employees in order to measure perceived organizational commitment:

• The organization takes pride in my accomplishments
• The organization really cares about my well-being
• The organization values my contributions to its well-being
• The organization strongly considers my goals and values
• The organization shows little concern for me (reverse scored)

Employees need support at work if they are expected to deliver the performance and citizenship that result from engagement. If employees believe they work for folks that don’t value their contributions or care about their well-being, they won’t feel safe enough to fully engage in their work.

I think this is ultimately a supervisory issue. If the organization is sincerely trying to provide this support to employees but discovers that individual supervisors are not fully “engaged” in the effort, those supervisors need to be developed or replaced. If you as a supervisor work for an organization that does not sincerely care about you or your direct reports, you should do your best to stop that “shit from rolling downhill” and provide those you have been given the privilege to supervise with as much support as you can.

As I’ve said a number of times, there is no substitute for caring. We now have some credible evidence for a link between caring, engagement, and employee performance.

Related Posts:

Want Your People To Care More? Help Them Perform Better

Help Your Employee Kick Ass

Fairness Matters

I blogged recently about new credible evidence that employee engagement might indeed affect employee performance. This is the best evidence we have so far that employee engagement produces tangible results, which is important because the hype surrounding engagement far exceeds the evidence. This new research also gave us a very specific definition of engagement, a new and better measure of engagement, and an evidence-based suggestion for three things that might enhance employee engagement.

One of the things this new research suggests enhances engagement is value congruence. Value congruence is the extent to which the individual can behave at work consistent with their own self-image. It’s very difficult to experience meaningfulness in our work if we are expected to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the highest values we espouse to ourselves and others.

When individuals find that their role expectations pull for behaviors that they feel are inappropriate for their preferred self-images, they feel devalued, taken advantage of, and less willing to give themselves to their work roles. (Rich, et al., 2010, p. 621).

This is where leadership integrity comes in. Leaders with integrity in the eyes of their employees speak and act in ways consistent with what employees value. The leader’s personal behavior reflects values congruent with employee values. As leaders inspire others to enact their best selves and stretch for higher and higher levels of performance, they never expect values to be compromised, and they never accept compromise in their own behavior or in the behavior of others they have been given the privilege to lead.

Find a disengaged employee and I’ll bet you will also find a leader lacking integrity.

Model the way for your employees by being open and clear about your values.  Then behave at work consistent with your values, and help your employees behave consistent with their values. Try not to hire and never promote people that are either void of or unwilling to make a public commitment to meaningful personal values. Partner with your employees to continuously improve the crappy systems that rob people of their pride of workmanship.

Don’t expect the engagement that flows from meaningful work to magically appear in others until you have the wisdom and courage to first do the right thing yourself.

Related Posts:

I Am Responsible For Adhering To The Highest Values That I Can Envision

Leadership: There Is No Substitute For Caring

Leadership Development: The Foundation