Title: Leader Emotional Engagement, Intelligence and Development (LEEID)
Names of Authors & Contact Details: Dean Horsman, Senior Lecturer, Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University ()
Leeds Business School, Faculty of Business & Law, Leeds Beckett University, The Rose Bowl, 1 Portland Gate, City Campus, Leeds, LS1 3HB
Stream: Employee Engagement
Submission Type: Refereed Paper
Abstract
Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distinction between the physical, cognitive, and in particular the emotional paths along which people personally engage and disengage. The paper focuses more on the emotional meaning,sensemaking and learning that employees have about work from a socially constructed perspective and the impact that this has on their ‘emotional engagement’.
Design/methodology/approach– The paper explores the development of employee engagement using an ‘integrated literature review’ as a form of secondary research. Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a more established and extensively debated academic concept, whereas ‘emotional engagement’ could be regarded as an emerging topic in a number of disciplines, with differing conceptualisations and related issues.
Findings– The paper found thatthere are four individual ‘bonds’ that need to be established in order to develop the right social climate for employee engagement. The papergoes on to suggest that a situated perspective on emotion would emphasize the role of social context in the production and management of an emotion, and the reciprocal influence of emotion on the evolving social context, very much in the vein of socially constructed learning (Lave & Wenger, 1990). From a leadership and organizational performance perspective, the potential to learn to become more self-aware of one’s emotions through a situated approach to emotions is a potential driver or enabler.
Practical implications– The paper exploresif there is a link between employees and their manager/leader’s emotional engagement, intelligence and development through learning that may be linked to organizational performance; initially through a review of the literature.
Social implications– This paper goes on to suggest that because emotions are dependent on and activated by social relationships, the social climate and social dimensions of work ought to be given greater acknowledgement.
Originality/value– Emotional engagement is a relatively new and emerging concept within the employee engagement literature.
Keywords– Employee Engagement, Emotional Engagement, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Management, Social Capital
Title: Leader Emotional Engagement, Intelligence and Development (LEEID) : A Review of the Literature
Introduction
As the concept of employee engagement has grown in popularity and use, there have been significant changes in definition, measurement, and conceptualization (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008; Wefald, 2008). Academic research has lagged behind practice (Macey and Schneider, 2008), the practitioner approach and the academic approach (Zigarmi et al., 2009), although some more rigorous academic research has emerged (Christian, Garza, and Slaughter, 2011; Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter, 2001; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006). For many academics, there is a significant gap of understanding on the topic (Macey and Schneider, 2008; Wefald, 2008), its history, and current use in HRM/HRD (Shuck and Wollard, 2009). The popularity of the concept in the practitioner community as well as the need for answers and the re-emergence of the concept in the academic community have led to differing perspectives (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes, 2002; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006; Wefald and Downey, 2009). Research, however, has shown that the concept of employee engagement shares an important relationship with organizational and performance outcome variables such as ‘going the extra mile’ (CIPD, 2005), discretionary effort and intention to turnover (Shuck, 2011) as well as organisational performance (Rich, et al., 2010).
Research Purpose
There is much academic debate about what engagement is, what it looks like, how it is defined and how organisations can harness it in terms of individual, team and ultimately improved organisational performance (Christian et al., 2011; Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes, 2002; Saks, 2006). Such differing perspectives offer a disjointed maze of models and frameworks on which to base future work around this emerging concept, affecting the application of the construct for both scholars and practitioners alike. An alternative to studying the whole debateable concept of employee engagement for the author in this paper, drawing upon the work of Kahn (1990), was to investigate the distinction between the physical, cognitive, and in particular the emotional paths along which people personally engage and disengage. The purpose of the paper was to focus more on the emotional meaning, sensemaking and learning that employees have about work from a socially constructed perspective (Griffiths and Scarantino, 1997) including the roles of manager/leader, the team(s), and organisation that they work for and the impact that this has on their ‘emotional engagement’.
Research Question
To explore if there is a link between employees and their manager/leader’s emotional engagement, intelligence and development through learning that may be linked to organizational performance; initially through a review of the literature.
Methodology
The intention in this paper was to explore the development of employee engagement throughout the past 30 years or so using an ‘integrated literature review’ as a form of secondary research. The “integrative literature review is a distinctive form of research that generates new knowledge” about an emerging topic of study (Torraco, 2005: 356). Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a more established and extensively debatedacademic concept, whereas ‘emotional engagement’ could be regarded as an emerging topic in a number of disciplines, with differing conceptualisations and related issues. The integrative literature review in this paper as suggested by Torraco (2005) involved identifying the issue(s); selecting the review as an appropriate research strategy; conducting a review of the relevant literature; then analysing and critiquing the literature to arrive at some insight or synthesis of the issue(s). The purpose was to define and situate the concept(s) within the HRM and HRD and organisational behaviour fields of study, whilst being inclusive of other professional areas such as internal communications, organizational development and strategic development. This was further expanded to include specific discourse regarding ‘emotional engagement’ and/or attachment, emotional intelligence, individual and social identity, self-efficacy and social capital within the areas of learning and development, leadership and management development and individual, team and organizational performance.
Method
For this review it is simply my intention to determine, analyse, and organise the existent literature across various disciplines and ideally determine a more refined working definition and conceptual model and/or framework drawn from a synthesis of the literature. Ultimately, at this stage the author sought to analyse any contradictory evidence that is appearing; where there is a change in a trend or direction of a phenomena and how it is reported; and when research emerges in different fields (Torraco, 2005).
As the principal focus of this review was academic in nature, the review of literature was mainly focused only on scholarly works that informed the academic understanding of employee engagement. Additionally some practitioner literature that was derived from professional associations (e.g. the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD)) and other sources such as reports that had some research underpinning. To conduct a broad, scholarly, multidisciplinary approach, the author searched the fields of Human Resources (HR), HRM, HRD, business, education, learning, management, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and health care. The databases searched included the following: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), PsycInfo, ABI/Inform, Proquest, Jstor, the Academy of Management database, and all four Academy of Human Resource Development Journals (e.g., Advances in Human Resource Development, Human Resource Development Review, Human Resource Development International, and Human Resource Development Quarterly). Amazon. com and Google Scholar were additionally used as data collection sources for available scholarly books. The keywords ‘emotion’, ‘engagement’, ‘emotional engagement’, ‘employee engagement’, ‘job engagement’, ‘personal engagement’ ‘work engagement’ and ‘workplace engagement’ were used independently to cast a wide net on existing literature.
The search was conducted in mid-2014 and limited to articles with keywords appearing in the abstract or title published in English language peer-reviewed journals or scholarly books. The search generated 751 publications for review. Publications were screened for relevance as determined by examining each title and abstract (Torraco, 2005) to ensure the article was about some aspect of emotional and/or employee engagement and that keywords were not paired together by chance. Any article containing an intentional use of a key word(s) was deemed relevant for review, downloaded, and saved for further reading. For example, a sentence that read “Community Engagement, Personal Responsibility and Self Help in Cuba's Health System Reform” (Luis, I. et al. 2012: 44), would not be considered relevant; however, a sentence that read “. . . to explore the conditions at work in which people personally engage” (Kahn, 1990: 692) was considered relevant.
For analysis and eventual synthesis of existing literature, all identified relevant literature (N = c210) was read and organized using open coding and constant comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, Wolfswinkel et al., 2013). Such grounded theory methods appeal to researchers that want a clear philosophical base for theory development and to discover meaning in existing data that is ‘grounded’ in empirical research. Consideration was given to the possibility of using a concept matrix that lists the key concepts of a topic along one axis of the matrix and the articles in which they were addressed along the other axis. Entries in the cells of the matrix show more frequently used concepts and their sources in the literature (Salipante et al., 1982; Webster and Watson 2002). This, however, was felt to be too time consuming in light of the fixed period in which this paper had to be prepared, although the author will revisit this in updating this review for his DBA thesis. In light of this, the author identified seminal works that had been cited frequently and where these seminal articles appeared elsewhere was indicative of more robustness amongst the academic community. The author, therefore, felt that these and other works of influence including any definitions therein, could be noted using citation software, uploaded to or from the Mendeley database and referenced using thematic data analysis by means of tags.
Findings - A Review of Scholarly Frameworks and Concepts
Definitions of Employee Engagement
The phrase ‘engagement’ has been found in the literature since the early 1990s, beginning with the work of Kahn (1990, p.694) who defined ‘personal engagement’ 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.” Kahn (1990) identified ‘personal engagement’ as having three dimensions – cognitive (rational) [1], affective (emotional) and physical (behavioural). He suggested thatemotional engagement in terms of people empathizing with others at work, or feeling satisfaction/dissatisfaction with their performance. Importantly for Kahn (1992 and 2010, cited in Albrecht et al.) is the notion of how employees present themselves at work (engaged) as opposed to being absent (disengaged). Despite this there is no widely accepted definition of employee engagement currently in use and Saks (2006: 600) stated that “Much of what has been written about employee engagement comes from the practitioner literature and consulting firms. There is a surprising dearth of research on employee engagement in the academic literature.” Christian et al. (2011) went on to conclude that research in employee engagement has been ‘beleaguered’ by various inconsistent definitions of the concept. As the concept of employee engagement has grown in popularity and use; a google search on the 3rd February 2015 returned 22,800,000 articles; it is evident that the concept is becoming ever more popular.
In the last 30 years, however, employee engagement has undergone significant changes in definition, measurement, and conceptualization (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008; Wefald, 2008). According to Macey & Schneider (2008) research in the scholarly community has lagged somewhat behind practice, although rigorous academic research has emerged (Christian, Garza, & Slaughter, 2011; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006). There is a significant gap of understanding on what employee engagement is (Macey & Schneider, 2008; Wefald, 2008), its history, and current use in HRM/HRD (Shuck & Wollard, 2010). Understandably, the popularity of the concept in the practitioner community as well as the need for answers and the re-emergence of the concept in the academic community have led inevitably to differing perspectives: the practitioner approach and the academic approach (Zigarmi et al., 2009). This is evident in the rise of and extant literature around ‘burnout’ linking employee engagement with the High Performance Work Practices movement in the 1990’s / 2000’s, particularly in the US, Europe and the UK (CIPD, 2005).
The main focus, however, of this review is on the academic approach to employee engagement, which is a recent, re-emerging phenomenon (Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006; Wefald & Downey, 2009). One of the key similarities, however, between the academic research and HRM/HRD practice (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002; Saks, 2006) has shown that the concept of employee engagement shares an important relationship with organizational and performance outcome variables such as ‘going the extra mile’ (CIPD, 2005), discretionary effort and intention to turnover (Shuck, 2010) as well as organisational performance (Rich et al. 2010; Robertson-Smith and Markwick, 2009). With particular reference to HRD and using only the search term employee engagement, Shuck and Wollard (2010) queried several scholarly and practitioner databases and found that as few as 159 peer-reviewed articles were published on the subject between 1990 and 2010. Of the 159 published, a mere 26 were considered empirically driven scholarly research. According to Shuck and Wollard (2010) only in 2009 did the first article containing the term employee engagement appear in an Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD)–sponsored journal (Chalofsky & Krishna, 2009).
However, there are a number of authors who have defined various terms around engagement, for example, ‘employee engagement’ (Harter et al., 2002), ‘job engagement’ (Rich et al., 2010), ‘personal engagement’ (Kahn, 1990), and ‘work engagement’ (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008) that through the regularity of citation would suggest some level of cognate synergy, which will be discussed in the next section. In the context of HR practitioners, Fleck and Inceoglu (2010) agreed with Macey & Schneider (2008: 4) that the term ‘employee engagement’ is taken to mean some or all of “involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, focused effort, and energy.” Fleck and Inceoglu (2010) go on to suggest that many studies evidence a strong relationship between engagement and organizational performance such as profitability, revenue growth, earnings per share, and employee turnover, which has conferred some level of legitimacy to the concept and rise in popularity (Macleod & Clarke, 2009). Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 31) state that “development of precise and agreed-upon definitions of the construct of engagement has lagged behind the rapid uptake of the construct in practice.” Macey and Schneider (2008) suggest that current definitions of engagement include defining it as a trait, a state, a set of behaviors, characteristics of the work environment, or a combination of these.
For Kahn (1990: 700), engagement is the “simultaneous employment and expression of a person’s ‘preferred self’ in task behaviors that promote connections to work and to others, personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional), and active, full role performance.” On the other hand ‘personal disengagement’ means “the uncoupling of selves from work roles; in disengagement, people withdraw and defend themselves physically, cognitively, or emotionally during role performances” (Kahn, 1990: 694). “People's behaviours display an evacuation or suppression of their expressive and energetic selves in discharging role obligations”, which he calls ‘role disengagement’ (Kahn, 1990, p.701). In role disengagement, demands guide task behaviours without the interplay between internal thoughts (cognitive) and feelings (emotional) and external requirements that characterize moments of personal engagement. They become physically uninvolved in tasks, cognitively unvigilant, and emotionally disconnected from others in ways that hide what they think and feel, their creativity, their beliefs and values, and their personal connections to others. (Kahn, 1990, p.702)
Maslach et al.’s (1997) burnout-antithesis approach focused on the lack of some psychological states such as exhaustion and the presence of positive psychological states such as involvement. For Maslach et al. (1997), an engaged employee exhibits positive energy, feels involved with the job, and feels that their contributions are productive. Engaged employees have positive energy focused towards their work and a consistent commitment to the quality of their work (Maslach et al. 2001). The differentiation between an engaged and a disengaged employee is the degree of personal investment an employee has in their task performance. Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter (2001: 417) go on to define employee engagement as “a persistent, positive, affective-motivational state of fulfilment in employees that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” It can be noted later that this definition has been further developed by Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma and Bakker (2002: 74) where it shares a number of key similarities, however, Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter’s (2001: 417) earlier definition also suggests that employee engagement is an affective-motivational state.
Harter et al. (2002: 269) define employee engagement as “the individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work.” In their meta-analysis study of business-unit-level relationships between employee satisfaction, employee engagement and business outcomes they used an instrument that was developed from studies of work satisfaction, work motivation, supervisory practices, and work-group effectiveness. Their underlying research at Gallup was based on ‘positive psychology’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) where they studied the characteristics of successful employees and managers and productive work groups. Throughout their research, which is both quantitative and qualitative, they indicated the importance of the supervisor/manager and their influence over the engagement level of employees and their satisfaction with their employer. The instrument that they have used and continue to use is the Gallup Workplace Audit (GWA), which is composed of an overall satisfaction item plus 12 items that measure employee perceptions of work characteristics and is more popularly known at the Gallup Q12 (Harter et al. 2002: 269).