RUNNING HEAD: Engagement in Six Asia-Pacific Countries and the U.S

RUNNING HEAD: Engagement in Six Asia-Pacific Countries and the U.S.

The Influence of Engagement and Self-directed Learning on Job Performance for Managers in Six Asian Countries and the U.S.

Dr. Kenneth R. Bartlett

Dr. Louis N. Quast

Mr. Dennis W. Paetzel

Ms. Pimsiri Aroonsri

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

Abstract

This study examined behavioral rating of managerial engagement behaviors, self-development behaviors, and job performance, examining relationships among these variables among samples of managers from six Asian countries (China, Japan, India, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore) and the United States. We found engagement to be a strong predictor of job performance in all countries examined. The relationship between self-development and job-performance, while statistically significant, was smaller across the board, and very small in China, Japan, and India. Examination of the relationship between the combined scale of engagement plus self-development had greater predictive utility for job-performance in all countries. In the combined analysis, the engagement scale accounted for the majority of the variance in job-performance.

This study is an international expansion of a preliminary study presented at the 2017 AHRD International Research Conference in the Americas entitled: “The Influence of Engagement and Self-Directed Learning on Job Performance for Managers” (Bartlett, et al., 2017). The current study extends this prior work with the adoption of a different methodological approach, and looked for the presence of patterns among respondents in six Asian countries: China, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand, comparing those with the patterns observed in the United States sample.

International HRD research has a long history of using the concept of culture to measure country-level effects and explain variance in behavior (Kuchinke, 1999). Culture has been defined as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others” (Hofstede, 2001, p.9). One of the most popular frameworks for research on international culture is Hofstede’s (2001) cultural dimensions: Individualism/Collectivism, Power Distance, Masculinity/Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation When a set of distinctive assumptions, values, and norms are shared among individuals in an organization, through social interactions, members will try to act in congruence with such norms in order to remain in good standing in the group (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). From this social psychological point of view, it is possible that the act of giving and receiving feedback among a group of employees is affected by potential fear of rejection from other group members as well as a longing for acceptance. Further, the relationships among supervisory feedback and key organizational variables may be different across different cultural contexts.

In an organizational context, feedback is a collection of reflective information on various aspects of individual and group performance. For individuals, feedback mayshape futurebehavior and by extension, affect the likelihood of career advancement (or avoidance of derailment). Norms which members of a group hold are likely to shape what observers perceive to be important and satisfactory in rating managerial behaviors on a feedback measure (Kowske & Anthony, 2007). In line with the argument about cultural influences on feedback, Shipper, Hoffman, and Rotondo (2007) suggested two reasons why 360 feedback instruments are likely to be impacted by culture. First, they noted the unequal share of values and assumptions by all cultures which are fundamental to the nature of the feedback process to give and receive information. Second, they noted the potential for interaction between 360 feedback and consequent outcomes (e.g. reaction, cognition, behavior, results) andseveral of Hofstede (2001)’s cultural constructs (e.g. uncertainty avoidance, power distance, individualism, masculinity) may play a role in the utility of such feedback systems. Therefore, it may be risky to assume similar interpretation of 360 feedback in different cultures.

International research often identifies variation in work related behaviors with difference betweencultures (Clark et al., 2016). Using the GLOBE study (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta, 2004) as an example, countries in the Confucian cluster, while similar to each other, maybe very different from countries in the Anglo cluster. For example, Bartlett, Lawler, Bae, Chen, and Wan (2002) found that HRD practices among large multinational organizations differed substantially when comparing patterns typically seen in Western countries with patterns observed in Asia.

There are additional cultural nuances thatshould not be overlooked when examining the interaction of cultural influence on feedback instruments. Even among countries that are clustered together in the GLOBE study (House, et al., 2004), meaningful differences do exist (Clark et al., 2016). Further, although power distance and individualism-collectivism originated as constructs that distinguish people across cultures (e.g., Hofstede, 2001), more recent research has argued there is substantial within-culture variation in value orientations arising from regional, ethnic, religious, and generational differences (Hofstede, 2001; Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006). This has prompted a growing number of researchers to examine power distance and individualism-collectivism as individual-differences constructs that vary within a single culture (e.g., Chan & Drasgow, 2001; Farh, Hackett, & Liang, 2007; Ilies, Wagner, & Morgeson, 2007; Kirkman, Chen, Farh, & Chen, 2009;Ng & Van Dyne, 2001; Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, Lucca, 1988)

It is important to recognize that national culture plays an important role in the way organizations within that culture operate. Taneja, Sewell, and Odom (2015) stated that some organizations with at least 60% of workers overseas are confronted with keeping their employees engaged and, at the same time, dealing with a changing business and educating their employees on cultural differences and performance management. Yet, studies that examine engagement among several countries and with comparison to the U.S. are limited. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of employee engagement in Asia.

Engagement

Debate on the definition of engagement has continued without a single agreed-upon definition for engagement (Saks & Gruman, 2014). Many scholars have focused to establish the conceptual boundaries and construct uniqueness of engagement compared to other similar and related concepts including job involvement, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior (Meyer, 2017; Meyer & Gagnè, 2008; Saks, 2006). Shuck and Rocco (2010) definedemployee engagement as it relates to the field of human resource development (HRD) as the “cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energy an employee directs toward positive organizational outcomes” (p. 103). Shuck and Rocco (2014) wrote that HRD is interested in engagement because it is at the intersection of improving performance and a person’s experiences at work. They went on to say that HRD can “not only look at how much performance can be leveraged, but also, how performance can be leveraged through experiences that enhance the meaning of work (Shuck & Rocco, 2014, p.118).”

Shuck(2011) identified four approaches to exploring the relationship between HRD and engagement: “Kahn’s (1990) need-satisfying approach, Maslach et al.’s (2001) burnout-antithesis approach, Harter et al.’s (2002) satisfaction-engagement approach, and Sak’s (2006) multidimensional approach” (p 316-317). Much of the HRD literature on engagement has pursued one or more of those four approaches. Interest in employee engagement has greatly increased since the first study by Kahn(1990) with Bailey, Madden, Alfes, and Fletcher (2017) noting that there are over three-quarters of a million studies on the topic. However, the proliferation of research from academic and scholar-practitioners has occurred as the levels of engagement in organizations has shown a global decline(Saks, 2017).

Employee engagement has grown in relevance and importance for international organizations (Schaufeli, Bakker, & Salanova, 2006) withgreater attention directed towards the study of engagement in an ever-broader range of countries. Selected examples of the diversity of countries used in recent employee engagement research has included: Malaysia (Ahmed, Majid, & Zin, 2016), France (Zecca, Györkös, Becker, Massoudi, de Bruin, & Rossier, 2015), Finland (Harju, Hakanen, & Schaufeli, 2016), India (Biswas, Varma, & Ramaswami, 2013), Sierra Leone (Vallières, McAuliffe, Hyland, Galligan, & Ghee, 2017), Jordan (Banihani & Syed, 2017), Thailand (Rurkkhum & Bartlett, 2012) and Japan (Eguchi, Shimazu, Bakker, Tims, Kamiyama, Hara, ... & Kawakami, 2016). Yet, in cross-cultural studies the findings of links between engagement with key antecedent and outcome variables have not always produced expected and hypothesized differences. This is especially notable in the case for studies in Asia(Hu, Schaufeli, Taris, Hessen, Hakanen, Salanova, & Shimazu, 2014) where cultural difference in work values often do not fully explain the findings. This highlights the need for additional research in this region, especially multi-national cross-country studies.

The research evidence indicates a number of positive outcomes to individuals and organizations from higher levels of engagement. Summarizing Madden and Bailey (2017), engagement is positively linked to employee life and job satisfaction, physical and psychological health, and level of organizational commitment. Further, engagement contributes to higher levels of task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, collaboration, creativity, and reduced turnover. In addition, collective measures of organizational engagement are also positively related to firm performance(Saks, 2017). In the proposal of a theoretical model linking engagement to three major domains of employees’ lives – work, personal life and community, Eldor(2016) suggested “work engagement forms a multi-faceted contribution: a competitive advantage for organizations, a promoter of employee well-being in the extra work realm of life, and community involvement” (p. 324).

A recent development in the literature is the classification of the ways organizations can drive engagement. Bakker (2017) identified strategic or top-down and proactive or bottom-up approaches. Strategic approaches to engagement highlight the role and research evidence that human resource management and HRD practices combined with senior and line-management transformational leadership behaviors facilitate higher levels of employee engagement. Whereas, proactive approaches reflect organizational recognition and encouragement for employees to alter their work environment and foster ways of thinking in order to generate higher levels of their own engagement. These proactive approaches include: self-management, job crafting, utilization of a strength, and mobilizing ego resources. Bakker concludes by noting that “employee work engagement is most likely in organizations with a clear HR strategy, in which leaders provide resources for their employees, and in which employees engage in daily proactive behaviors” (p. 67)

The shift to identification of observable behavioral measures of engagement provides an extension to the majority of early work focused on affective and cognitive aspects of engagement. Shuck and Wollard (2010) identified specific behaviors related to high-levels of employee engagement. Others have proposed models of felt engagement and behavioral engagement (Stumpf, Tymon, & van Dam, 2013). This supports the conceptualization of engagement as a multi-factorial behavioral, attitudinal, and affective individual differences variable (Alfes, Truss, Soane, Rees, & Gatenby, 2013; Macey & Schneider, 2008; May, Gilson & Hartner, 2004; Rich et al., 2010). The behavioral approach suggests that high levels of engagement might drive specific patterns of behavior consistent with the definition of engagement, and that the levels of engagement in an individual might be identified by observing and measuring such behaviors as an indication of the underlying psychological and emotional state (Bartlett, Quast, Wohkittel, Center, & Chung, 2012).

Using this approach, Bartlett et al. (2012) identified eight behaviors among those measured in the multisource feedback instrument used in this study, that were consistent with Shuck and Wollard’s (2010) findings. Using behaviors to estimate underlying levels of engagement varies from other studies in two ways. First, it examines behaviors displayed by employees in an organizational setting instead of measuring perceived attitude or cognitive state. Second, it uses the supervisor’s ratings of these observed behaviors. There is little research available that examined the links between behavioral measures of engagement and formal and informal HRD activities inside an organization.

Self-Development

Formal training and development programs have been the dominant approach to learning and skill enhancement efforts for organizations (Noe, Clarke, & Klein, 2014; Tannenbaum, Beard, McNall, & Salas, 2010). However, radical economic, social, and cultural changes in the labor market in recent years have highlighted the vital role of learning processes in individual career development and organizational performance (Manuti, Pastore, Scardigno, Giancaspro, & Morciano, 2015). Further, organizations now rely to a greater extent on different forms of informal learning (Birdi et al., 1997; Noe, Wilk, Mullen, & Wanek, 1997; Tannenbaum et al., 2010). As notedby Cerasoli, Alliger, Donsbach, Mathieu, Tannenbaum, and Orvis (2016),research over the past twenty years has shown a growing consensus that 70% to 90% of organizational learning occurs not through formal training but informally, on-the-job, and in an ongoing manner. Historically, self-development informal learning activities have been passively advocated but not actively initiated, encouraged, or supported by organization feedback and training systems characterized by traditional HR functions. Shuck, Rocco, and Albornoz (2010) observed patterns of employees who sought out new opportunities for learning and growth, and who tried to find new ways to challenge themselves. These efforts included attempting to find such development opportunities by switching organizations, a costly pattern to the current employer. While there continues to be interest in self-directed learning methods and outcomes (London & Mone, 1999), the relationship of informal learning to employee engagement has been largely overlooked.

Brockett and Hiemestra (1991, p. 24) defined self-directed learning as “a process in which a learner assumes primary responsibility for planning, implementing and evaluating the learning process”. Self-development occurs when an individual realizes that there is a need to take control of their own development (Antonacopoulou, 2000). For a variety of reasons, there is little literature on self-development and its links to HRD (Candy, 1991; Gerstner, 1992; Hamlin & Stewart, 2011; Merriam, 2001). As noted by Boyce, Zaccaro and Wisecarver, (2010), little research has examined the characteristics associated with individuals who actively initiate self-development activities to enhance leadership skills. Their study of junior-military leaders found self-development was higher in individuals with work and career growth orientations related to mastery at work. Somewhat surprisingly, their findings found that organizational support reduced the relationship between motivation and skill in self-development with reported levels of self-development activities. The extent to which these finding would be found in non-military organizational contexts is unknown.

Reichard and Johnson (2011) proposed a model of leader self-development that linked organizational level constructs such as human resources practices with group level norms, supervisor style, and social networks with the individual leader self-development process. This approach suggests that further research is needed to understand the drivers of self-development for leaders and how this relates to desired organizational outcomes, such as engagement, and if differences among selected Asian countries and the U.S. exist.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between among engagement, self-development, and job performance in managers working in six selected Asian countries and the U.S. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine differences and/or similaritiesobserved among the six Asian countries included in this study and compare those results observed in the U.S.

Research question 1a: What is the relationship between engagement and job performance among managers in six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Research question 1b: What is the relationship between self-development and job performance among managers in six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Research question 1c: When examined together, what is the relationship between engagement, self-development, and job performance among managers in six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Research question 2a: What differences, if any, can be observed in the relationships between engagement and job performance when comparing results between each of six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Research question 2b: What differences, if any, can be observed in the relationships between self-development and job performance when comparing results between each of six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Research question 2c: What differences, if any, can be observed in the relationships between engagement, self-development and job performance when examined together, when comparing results between each of six Asian countries and the U.S.?

Methods

The data used for this study were drawn from an international archival database of ratings on The PROFILOR for Managers (PDI Ninth House, 2004), a multisource feedback rating tool consisting of 135 behavioral items. All participants were managers, and this study used ratings provided by the direct supervisor of the manager being profiled, typically a senior or executive-level leader. The ratings were done on a five-point Likert-type response scale, ranging from not at all (1) to a very great extent (5). From the database of 25 plus countries, six Asia-Pacific countries with sufficient sample size were selected. Before listwise deletion totals: 1,904 managers from China; 768 managers from India; 4,150 managers from Japan; 381 managers from South Korea; 392 managers from Singapore; 221 managers from Thailand; and 42,941 managers from the United States. After listwise deletion totals:1,756 managers from China; 702 managers from India; 4,119 managers from Japan; 333 managers from South Korea; 357 managers from Singapore; 195 managers from Thailand; and 38,878 managers from the United States. Results from each country were examined and compared to each other and to results from the United States. All participants provided electronic consent allowing their data to be anonymously aggregated. Studies have examined supervisors’ observations of managerial behaviors associated with transformational leadership and engagement (Breevaart, Bakker, Demerouti, & Derks, 2016); however, there are few studies that have directly examined the supervisors’ ratings of subordinate managers’ engagement behaviors directly.

Each variable used in this study was developed based on existing theory and literature, and some had been used in earlier research. Bartlett et al. (2012) developed and utilized the employee engagement scale that was used in this study. The employee engagement scale was created by an expert panel, made up of subject matter experts holding advanced degrees in HRD, that identified seven behavioral items from the PROFILOR® instrument that described behaviors associated with high levels of employee engagement consistent with behaviors identified in other studies (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008; Saks, 2006). Sample items include: Lives up to commitments; readily puts in extra time and effort; persists in the face of obstacles; drives hard on the right issues; and displays a high-energy level. Scale reliabilities were computed for the scales in each of the countries involved (α = U.S. 0.87, China 0.88, India 0.85, Japan 0.90, South Korea 0.86, Singapore 0.88, and Thailand 0.86).