Employee Engagement and Productivity- What Evidence Says

 

 

Worldwide surveys of employee engagement conducted by Gallup, year after year since 2000, says that only 13 % of employees working for an organisation are engaged and in USA it is 32%. The question is- so what? and should we bother? In US alone organisations invest about US$ 720 annually on employee engagement improvement and measurement and people are not sure what they get out of it.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is not a uniformly understood construct. According to Gallup, an engaged employee is supposed to be “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace".  What is measured in the process of measuring employee engagement – job satisfaction and organisational commitment. 

Does employee engagement improve employee productivity?

The fact is, based on research studies, employee engagement is poorly linked with task performance and extra role performance. Extra role performance is also known as contextual performance and corporate citizenship behaviour. While task performance is logically related to employee productivity, some studies indicate that contextual performance / organisational citizenship behaviour is also  positively related with individual and organisational performance. But statistical significance may not be of practical significance. Practical significance considers effect size, which is generally ignored by reporting of scientific studies particularly in management research. Academic papers consider the statistical significance. And it is through statistical significance a theory or hypothesis is rejected or accepted. The pathway of improved organisational performance due to contextual performance improvement must be through improvement in individual’s job-related performance, which is directly related to task performance.  It may be mentioned that job performance has two components: Task performance and Contextual performance. Task performance is defined by, “Task performance as a behaviour that is formally recognized as part of the job that contributes to the organization's technical core”. And contextual performance goes beyond formal job description. It is commonly associated with “coaching co-workers, strengthening social networks within an organization and going the extra mile for the organization”. Therefore, simply by increasing contextual performance organisational performance can’t be increased. Here one may argue that research also says that organisational citizenship behaviour or contextual performance improves individual performance as evident from performance evaluation. It is true that there is an association but whether it is a causal relationship, we are not sure.

Let us look into another piece of high-quality evidence. CIPD research establishes that performance evaluation suffers from rater-centric errors or bias. It has been found that raters are influenced by the actions of the ratees  - “• employee demonstrating organisational citizenship behaviour, which leads to higher ratings for their core work • ingratiation, self-promotion or other tactics to influence managers, supported by their political skills, which lead to higher ratings”.

What is the takeaway?

So, we may conclude that employee engagement as it is measured today is not a good predictor of employee productivity. The organisations those who are investing on improving the employee engagement and its measurement by survey should reconsider whether they will continue to do so and those who are not yet started the initiatives must think before implementing this HR fad.

A different way the construct ‘work engagement’ has been conceived, which includes three dimensions- vigour, dedication, and absorption and a new measuring instrument has been developed - Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES). But there is no empirical evidence in the extant literature that claims that the measured variable is a good predictor of employee productivity improvement.

[ Note: Dr. Prabir Kumar Bandyopadhyay, is an Evidence-Based Management (EBM) evangelist and works towards spreading the awareness on EBM in decision making. To empower HR professionals on using evidence in the HR decision making process, he is organising a programme on Evidence-Based HR Management. Registration in the programme is now open and interested professionals may contact: ethreemanagementconsulting@gmail.com]