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In today’s tough economic environment, companies are forced to work more efficiently and effectively with the resources they have at their disposal. At the same time companies are struggling to attract and retain good people with the necessary attributes and skills in order for them to remain competitive. The challenge today is not just retaining talented people, but fully engaging them, capturing their minds and hearts at each stage of their work lives. Employee engagement has emerged as a critical driver of business success in today’s competitive marketplace.
Further, employee engagement can be a deciding factor in organizational success. Not only does engagement have the potential to significantly affect employee retention, productivity and loyalty, it is also a key link to customer satisfaction, company reputation and overall stakeholder value.
An early and widely used definition of engagement dates back to the 90’s and is reported as the ‘harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances’.
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Kahn (1990) was one of the first to theorize about work engagement. He described engaged employees as being fully physically, cognitively, and emotionally connected with their work roles. Engagement refers to focused energy that is directed toward organizational goals. Engaged employees are more likely to work harder through increased levels of discretionary effort than are those who are disengaged. Work engagement is different from job satisfaction in that it combines high work pleasure (dedication) with high activation (vigor, absorption); job satisfaction is typically a more passive form of employee well-being.
Work engagement is different from work-related flow in that it refers to a longer performance episode; flow typically refers to a peak experience that may last only 1 hour or even less. Finally, work engagement is different from motivation, in that it also refers to cognition (absorption) and affect (vigor)—in addition to motivation (dedication). Not surprisingly then, work engagement is a better predictor of job performance than are many earlier constructs.
Procedural is why they are successful at enhancing employee engagement. Justice refers to the perceived fairness of the processes and procedures in place to achieve organizational outcomes. For example, if the process of allocating work tasks within a team is based on a set of fair parameters (such as resources, skills, job role, experience), even if the outcome isn’t favorable for an employee the negative consequences are reduced. When a process leading to a certain outcome is thought to be unfair, the employee’s reactions are directed at the whole organization, rather than at the task or the specific outcome. Increasing perceptions of procedural justice can be achieved by:
As indicated by Schminke et al. (1997), the fundamental concept underpinning both ethics and organizational justice is fairness, which influences people’s judgment about right and wrong. Fair treatment is something that employees who invest their time and energies in an organization “expect”. For instance, the importance of procedural justice is supported by a rich set of findings indicating that employee evaluations of the fairness of decision-making processes and the quality of treatment have a strong influence on employee behavior. These findings suggest that the basis of employees’ relationships with their organizations is primarily linked to the role the organization plays in determining how employees think and feel about themselves. Many important practical implications follow from this insight. First and foremost, our findings highlight the motivational power of getting employees to develop social identities that are grounded in their work organizations. This is critical, as the current results show that identity is central to employee behavior. Furthermore, the results indicate two important levers that organizations can use to encourage the development of social identity. First, organizations can operate in ways that employees regard as procedurally fair by instituting fair decision-making processes and extending fair quality of treatment. Second, they can provide economic outcomes that employees regard favorably and that encourage employees to link their social identities to their organization.
Positive views of one’s group and one’s place within the group likely fuel a drive to see the group succeed, and this likelihood makes the evaluative component quite important for predicting extrarole behavior. However, the evaluative component may be less important for outcomes such as conformity to group norms, which likely result from deindividuation processes associated with identification. Third, and related to our prior point, a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanism by which social identity impacts behavior is needed.
Distributive justice is related to the perceived fairness outcomes such as payment and promotion. Distributive justice focuses on the extent to which rewards and punishments are related to job performance. When employees perceive justice in the organization, they are less likely to seek opportunities to balance things out by increasing their own benefits at the company’s expense. Additionally, when employees are treated fairly, they are “more willing to subordinate their own short-term individual interests to the interests of a group or organization”. The logic of distributive justice is straightforward – participant satisfaction is increased when one believes that the resolution of the dispute is fair and favorable. Tang and Sarsfield Baldwin (1996) argued that distributive justice leads to organizational effectiveness.
Procedural justice is concerned with one’s perception of the process that determines fair pay. Theory and research has established that procedures are judged as fair if they are implemented consistently, without self-interest, on the basis of accurate information, with opportunities to correct the decision, with the interests of all concerned parties represented, and following moral and ethical standards. Procedural justice towards employees is a basis for employee commitment. Procedural justice influences individuals‟ perceptions of fairness in regard with pay raises and promotions as well as organizational commitment and job satisfaction.
Perceived interactional justice depends on employees‟ reaction to the manner in which their direct supervisors carry out formal procedures. Interactional justice is defined as the quality of interaction that an individual receives during the enactment of organizational procedures and concerns the human aspect of organizational practices. Greenberg (1993) has argued that interactional justice should be divided into two distinct components, informational justice and interpersonal justice.
Informational justice focuses on the enactment and explanation of decision making procedures. Research suggests that explanations about the procedures used to determine outcomes enhance perceptions of informational justice. Explanations provide the information needed to evaluate the structural aspects of the process and how it is enacted; however, for explanations to be perceived as fair they must be recognized as sincere and communicated without ulterior motives, based on sound reasoning with logically relevant information, and determined by legitimate rather than arbitrary factors.
Interpersonal justice reflects the degree to which people are treated with politeness, dignity, and respect by authorities. The experience of interpersonal justice can alter reactions to decision outcomes, because sensitivity can make people feel better about an unfavorable outcome. Interpersonal treatment includes interpersonal communication, truthfulness, respect, propriety of questions, and justification, and honesty, courtesy, timely feedback, and respect for rights.
Stemming from the work of Hackman and Oldman (1980) and Bakker and Demerouti (2007) there is robust evidence of the positive contribution a well-designed and enriched job has on engagement. When designing any job to maximize engagement, ideally it should provide: work that is challenging to the individual; a variety of work tasks; the opportunity to use a number of different skills; autonomy and the use of personal discreet ion; the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution; and feedback mechanisms. JC play an important role in engaging employees because such employees put more efforts into their work if they are able to identify with it.
Research has established that monotony fuels psychological distress among jobholders. Such distress might disengage employees cognitively from their work. Volmer et al. (2012) argue that disengagement is an affective coping mechanism that may buffer an employee from internalizing stress out of challenging working conditions. Individuals who perceive to be engaged in a variety of tasks, on the other hand, consider their work to be interesting and motivational.
The study’s findings provide evidence that satisfaction of needs fully accounted for the relationship between job resources and exhaustion and partially explained the relationships between job demands to exhaustion and between job resources to vigor. This suggests that employees who are surrounded by resourceful job characteristics are more likely to experience a general feeling of psychological freedom (i.e., autonomy), interpersonal connectedness (i.e., belongingness), and effectiveness (i.e., competence), which in turn explains why they feel less exhausted, and more vigorous in their jobs. Employees who encounter many job demands, in contrast, seem to be more likely to have their basic psychological needs thwarted and therefore experience more exhaustion.
Basic need satisfaction could however not fully account for the relationship between job resources and vigor and the relationship between job demands and exhaustion. Other mediators might therefore be examined to fully understand the relationship between job resources and vitality, including for example goal-accomplishment.
Resources may be located at organizational level (i.e. salary and career opportunities), interpersonal relations (i.e. supervisor and co-worker support), the organization of work (i.e. role clarity) and task level (i.e. task significance and autonomy). Applied within the South African context, job resources such as organizational support, growth opportunities and career advancement were positively related to work engagement. The number one factor that influences employee engagement is the manager employee relationship. The manager creates the connection between the employee and the organization, and as a result, the manager-employee relationship is often the “deal breaker” in relation to retention. A recent study shows that employees who trust their managers appear to have more pride in the organization and are more likely to feel they are applying their individual talents for their own success and that 18 of the organization. However, the findings show only 56% of employees feels their manager have good knowledge of what they do and promotes the use of their unique talents. Managers who demonstrate the following characteristics promote employee engagement:
Generations X and Y have different workplace expectations than do the baby boomers and mature workers (Families and Work Institute, 2004). By being aware of the unique needs of diverse groups, as well as by recognizing individual differences within these groups, HR can better understand the challenges of increased diversity in the organization’s workforce and work toward designing and implementing workplace policies and practices to engage diverse employee groups
The observation that basic need satisfaction plays an explanatory role in the relationships between job demands, job resources, and the core components of burnout (i.e., exhaustion) and engagement (i.e., vigor) has practical implications. Specifically, for jobs to be health promoting, it would seem useful to design them so that they yield supportive features for employees to experience volitional functioning, competence, and belongingness. Moreover, this study adds to the growing body of work that shows that basic need satisfaction can account for the effects of a variety of social-contextual and personal characteristics on job well-being and performance, including the effects of leadership styles, work climates, and employees’ personal intrinsic (relative to extrinsic) work value orientations. The concept of basic need satisfaction, as defined within Self-Determination Theory, might thus form a promising mechanism through which organizational policies can be adjusted.
To improve distributive justice, administrators should be fairer in the application of rules at organizations and in distribution of work, tasks, rewards and promotions. Also, in order to improve procedural justice, decision-making processes should adhere to a number of specific rules. For example, procedures should utilize accurate information, be consistent across persons and time, be unbiased, offer mechanisms for correction, represent key groups‟ concerns, and adhere to prevailing ethical standards. Interpersonal justice is fostered when authorities adhere to specific rules of fair interpersonal communication ˗ rules that were derived from studies of communication during recruitment efforts. Specifically, Bies and Moag (1986) argued that authorities should treat others with respect and should refrain from making improper statements. If one experiences a violation of the respect and propriety rules, then it is clear that ethical standards for the enactment of decision-making procedures were not followed. In the language of fairness theory, this type of violation suggests that the authority should have acted differently.
The Importance Of Employee Engagement For Successful Performance Of an Organization. (2024, Feb 13). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-importance-of-employee-engagement-for-successful-performance-of-an-organization-essay
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