Research Paper Study on measuring

Study on measuring the difference in perception of employee

engagement among employees and their direct Managers

Abstract

Employee engagement has been of the core areas of focus for organizations, especially in the

post-pandemic world. While creating new policies to engage employees, it is vital to measure

every aspect of it. One of the critical factors that affect the design of the engagement practices is

to gauge how managers feel the employees are engaged and how employees feel they themselves

are engaged. Rather than finding the universal definition of employee engagement, organizations

have started building strategies for employee engagement. This study focuses on measuring the

gap in the perception of engagement among managers and employees.

Proposed Design/Methodology Approach: The research has been done both quantitatively as

well as qualitatively. Surveys were used for quantitative data, while in-depth interviews were

conducted to collect the qualitative data. The data was collected sequentially by gathering

qualitative data first, followed by quantitative data. Primary data was collected by interviewing

the managers and employees of 8 companies with a structured questionnaire method. Sample

Size being 140 for quantitative data, sampling Method used is Stratified Sampling Method.

Originality/Value: Researches have been conducted in the pre-COVID era, but the COVID 19

has made employee engagement a hygiene factor rather than a motivator. With robust data on the

difference of perception, companies can use this research to design their policies that aim to

bridge this gap and reduce the additional cost that comes with an overhead of misplaced policies

that don’t focus on bridging this gap. The study expects to bring out the changing definitions and

perceptions of employee engagement in the digitized world and move towards the future of

work. Earlier studies have been done with the “Work from the office” model, but the default

practices have been changing rapidly, and more data is required as we enter into the work from

home/hybrid model.

The study captures subjects’ sentiments and priorities in the VUCA(Volatile, uncertain, complex,

and ambiguous) world. And as the definition and perception of employee engagement keeps

varying. It is essential to understand the priorities, especially at this pivotal moment.

Key Words: Employee Engagement, Employee Perception, Manager Perception, Policies

Introduction:

Human resource is the most precious resource that needs to be used in today’s constantly

changing business context, and organizations realize this either proactively or reactively. This

entails attracting and retaining the top performers and keeping them engaged and committed to

the organization’s objectives.

What separates high productive organizations from the rest is the quality of their employees and

how much they are committed to their work. At the same time, the trust and support an

organization provides to an employee and the efforts they take to keep them focused are

distinguishing factors that create a highly productive workplace. Employee engagement occurs

only in companies that respect their employees as their most valuable asset and provide for their

fundamental requirements and other psychological needs. Workplaces that satisfy each of these

employee engagement criteria develop significantly quicker and last far longer than those that do

not.

According to Igloo’s 2019 State of the Digital Workspace Report, 70 % of distributed team

members feel “left out” of the workplace. And with the shift to remote work and work from

home in all industries, employee engagement and ending this sense of isolation should be the top

priority for all organizations.

Employee engagement has seen a long journey since it first appeared in an academic journal in

1990. Before that, employee satisfaction used to be a focus area, and there was no focus on

performance. As we moved forward in time, the concept of commitment arose and then studies

started focusing on mapping performance and commitment with the employee output of the

company. Through the studies and trends, employers worldwide started seeking loyalty to the job

and created systems around it.

‘From People to Profits, the HR Link to the Service-Profit Chain,’ a paper published by the

Institute of Employment Studies (IES) in 1990, demonstrated the positive correlation between

sales performance, customer retention, and employee’s attitudes and behavior. HR has now

grown from being just a supportive function to now treating employees like customers. The new

terminology of CxHR focuses on employee experience to gain a more competitive advantage of

the brand value and repositioning in the competitive market.

As most companies move towards the Work from Home model, there have been many changes

in the way employees and teams operate. According to Gallup’s report, there has been a

reduction in water cooler conversations, brainstorming sessions, and casual conversations that

are used to keep employees engaged. With this distance, companies have a significant challenge

to engage them. Companies are changing their strategies to adapt to the new fully functional

work from home model. And having the right tools and data about the difference in mindset

shifts both of employees and leadership is an important area to highlight.

Literature Review:

With increasing globalization, the competition in the market is constantly growing, and so is the

talent competition. The war for talent has never been so rigorous as it is now since the tables

have turned and employees are winning in this global chase for talent. For employers, it becomes

necessary to have an engaged workforce for the growth and smooth functioning of the

organization. As Baumruk (2004) says in his research, all institutions and companies strive to be

superior to others and brings forward the concept of competitive advantage and how employers

all over the world as aligning employee engagement as way to reach that position of advantage.

Margaretha and Saragih (2008); Cameron (2005) states that the significant and symbiotic relationship of

employee engagement between individual, group, and organizational performance in the areas of

retention (Schaufeli and Bakker (2004); Insync Surveys), satisfaction (Vance (2006); Wagner & Harter

(2006); Salanova et al. (2005); Frank et al., (2004), turnover (Harter et al. (2002); Harmon et al., (2003));

Morrison et al. (2007); Buchanan (2004)), company reputation (Kemp et al. (2013); Rothbard (2001)),

overall stakeholder value (Swetha and Kumar), productivity (Simha and Vishnu Vardhan (2015))

While most organizations are unanimous on the importance of engagement in an organization,

the perception of engagement is something that can still be debated in various facets. This is

starkly visible with a plethora of definitions.

Kahn (1990) used the term employee engagement to define it from the perspective of harnessing

of organization members’ selves to their work roles. Wellins and Concelman (2005) indicated

that engagement is a mixture of commitment, loyalty, productivity, and ownership. Schaufeli et

al. (2002) defined engagement as a pleasant, gratifying, work-related state of mind marked by

energy, devotion, and absorption and a more lasting and pervasive affective-cognitive form not

centered on any one item event individual, or action. Harter et al. (2002) defined employee

engagement as the individual’s involvement and satisfaction with and enthusiasm for work.

Towers Perrin; Hewitt; Mercer explains employee engagement as a contribution of “employees’

willingness, ability, and motivation to organization’s success.” Hay specifies employee

engagement as “Employees’ exertion of “discretionary effort, and it’s not just meeting the

standards of the assigned job.” May et al. (2004) defined employee engagement in a way that the

concept of engagement includes cognition and the applied flexibility of emotions and behaviors.

Baumruk (2004) explains employee engagement to be an intellectual and emotional commitment

of employees in the job. Truss et al., (2006) brings forward the concept of “passion for work.”

Mackey and Sisodia (2014) brought the construct of higher purpose and service to others. Saks

got into various focus antecedents of employee engagement.

Not just the definition but other factors like the inter-relation between engagement and

personality has been discussed. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Lewis Garrad, and Didier Elzinga,

in their research article “Is employee engagement just a reflection of personality,” sheds light on

a different perspective of employee engagement. They specify in their paper that if organizations

want an engaged workforce, the best way to ensure that is to hire people with “engageable”

personalities.

With so many definitions among the scholars, there hasn’t been a single approach towards

handling employee engagement and neither a single perception of engagement in the minds of

organizations and employees equally.

Research done by the CIPD institute inspires the model used in this study. The Chartered

Institute of Personnel and Development is a professional association for people who work in

human resource management. It is very crucial and imperative to understand the various level of

engagement. The transactional, emotional, and intellectual engagement separates the idea of

engagement into multiple facets. Numerous reports and studies and the data collected clearly

separates the employees who perform their job only because they have to and out of habit from

those who have an emotional attachment to work and those who enjoy their work. As Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi says in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “Most

enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But

once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be

intrinsically rewarding.”. Hence, these three areas of engagement separate the approach,

outcomes, and need for engagement in individuals. And provided that individuals can be

involved in many areas of their job and that this can change over time, it becomes clear that

engagement is a multi-faceted idea that requires an actual depth of understanding to be

adequately influenced:

• Employees’ desire to make a living and meet the employer’s and their coworkers’

minimum expectations shape transactional engagement.

• Employees’ desire to accomplish more for (and receive more from) their employers

drives emotional engagement. Emotional engagement is not a customary psychological

contract but a higher form of engagement.

• When individuals are intellectually engaged in their work, it implies they are excited by it

and are thus far more likely to care whether or not they are performing it to the best of

their capacity. They will also be more motivated to improve themselves in order to

continue contributing to the best of their abilities since they love being good at what they

do.

The correlations in the model are a type of point-in–time described by these relationships.

Intellectually engaged employees outperform transactionally involved individuals, and emotional

involvement is linked to more extraordinary performance with work-related activities that

generate pleasant sentiments.

Research Gap:

Earlier research took into accounts the single perspective of either the employees or of the

organizations. The current study bridges the gap of finding out how the difference and similarity

perception of engagement from both the stakeholders result in a comprehensive approach to employee

engagement.

Earlier studies demonstrate the importance of engagement, but a comparative study between the

perception of employees and managers needs to be analyzed a bit more.

Engagement is complex and difficult to segregate. From inception to today, people and organizations

have not been on the same page to define it and.

Hence it is not enough to talk of engagement in its basic form, but we should also enquire:

(a) What type of engagement is required?

(b) Where is the locus of engagement?

c) How do all stakeholders perceive engagement?

Methodology:

The 3-tier engagement model of Transactional, Emotional and Intellectual Engagement is used to

map the inputs/drivers of employee engagement and the results/outputs that these subsequently

provide.

The inputs were formulated where qualitative data was collected in the form of an interview

from managers and then mapped to the data points to be contained in the form of a questionnaire

from the employees, which were qualitatively analyzed.

The interview questions asked to managers are presented below: