The DOI matches its Crossref record; 52 of the 52 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What Do We Really Know About Employee Engagement?
Abstract
Employee engagement has become one of the most popular topics in management. In less than 10 years, there have been dozens of studies published on employee engagement as well as several meta‐analyses. However, there continue to be concerns about the meaning, measurement, and theory of employee engagement. In this article, we review these concerns as well as research in an attempt to determine what we have learned about employee engagement. We then offer a theory of employee engagement that reconciles and integrates Kahn's () theory of engagement and the Job Demands–Resources (JD‐R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, ). We conclude that there continues to be a lack of consensus on the meaning of employee engagement as well as concerns about the validity of the most popular measure of employee engagement. Furthermore, it is difficult to make causal conclusions about the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement due to a number of research limitations. Thus, there remain many unanswered questions and much more to do if we are to develop a science and theory of employee engagement.
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Citations
Cites
The job demands-resources model of burnout.
Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.499 · Cited by 13,643
The Job Demands‐Resources model: state of the art
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007) · Journal of Managerial Psychology · doi:10.1108/02683940710733115 · Cited by 12,996
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.397 · Cited by 12,852
PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT AND DISENGAGEMENT AT WORK.
Kahn, W. A. (1990) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.2307/256287 · Cited by 10,975
The measurement of engagement and burnout: a two sample confirmatory factor analytic approach.
Schaufeli, W. B., Salanova, M., González-romá, V., & Bakker, A. B. (2002) · Journal of Happiness Studies · doi:10.1023/a:1015630930326 · Cited by 10,014
Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement: a multi‐sample study
Schaufeli, W. B., & Bakker, A. B. (2004) · Journal of Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1002/job.248 · Cited by 9,297
The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study
Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., & Salanova, M. (2006) · Educational and Psychological Measurement · doi:10.1177/0013164405282471 · Cited by 7,403
Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement
Saks, A. M. (2006) · Journal of Managerial Psychology · doi:10.1108/02683940610690169 · Cited by 5,577
Self-citationHarter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002) · Journal of Applied Psychology · doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.268 · Cited by 4,623
Job Engagement: Antecedents and Effects on Job Performance
Rich, B. L., Lepine, J. A., & Crawford, E. R. (2010) · Academy of Management Journal · doi:10.5465/amj.2010.51468988 · Cited by 3,833
Cited by
Borst, R. T., Kruyen, P. M., & Lako, C. J. (2019) · Review of Public Personnel Administration · doi:10.1177/0734371x17729870 · Cited by 245
The drivers of work engagement: a meta-analytic review of longitudinal evidence
Lesener, T., Gusy, B., Jochmann, A., & Wolter, C. (2020) · Work & Stress · doi:10.1080/02678373.2019.1686440 · Cited by 213
Gamification and gigification: A multidimensional theoretical approach
Behl, A., Jayawardena, N., Ishizaka, A., Gupta, M., & Shankar, A. (2022) · Journal of Business Research · doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.09.023 · Cited by 104
Kossyva, D., Theriou, G., Aggelidis, V., & Sarigiannidis, L. (2024) · Journal of Knowledge Management · doi:10.1108/jkm-03-2022-0174 · Cited by 101
Basit, A. A. (2017) · The Journal of Psychology · doi:10.1080/00223980.2017.1372350 · Cited by 100
Metadata
- Authors
- Saks, A. M., & Gruman, J. A.
- Venue
- Human Resource Development Quarterly
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-06
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 155-182
- ISSN
- 1044-8004 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-1096
- OpenAlex
- W1997885713
- Cited by
- 678
- References
- 52
- FWCI
- 63.29
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
