I am wondering if there is some truth to the idea that engagement is just a new corporate cliché. In public relations we have readily accepted and adapted this popular concept. We have taken it one step further and applied engagement not only to internal audiences but to all types of publics. This year’s BledCom symposium is building upon that and in our call for papers we quote Richard Edelman, who stated that public engagement is the future of public relations. Engagement is definitely in.
In the corporate world, measuring and improving (mostly employee) engagement is also increasingly popular, but do the companies that use the concept actually understand it? Maybe there is some truth to a statement made by Madeline Crawford – people harmoniously agree that, regardless of what it actually means, engagement is an indispensable factor for the success and growth of an organization. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, entitled “Engaging your employees is good, but don’t stop there” (Garton & Mankins, https://hbr.org/2015/12/engaging-your-employees-is-good-but-dont-stop-there), the authors discuss the concept of an employee needs pyramid. According to them, and comparable to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, employees have levels of needs when it comes their relationships with the organization and their jobs.
The first level of the pyramid describes satisfied employees; the second, engaged ones; and the third, inspired employees (similar to Maslow’s self-actualization). They state this relationship can be quantified. It takes two and a quarter satisfied employees to generate the same output as one inspired employee.
When the relationship between employee engagement (or satisfaction, or inspiration) and performance is presented as causal, is this actually accurate? Correlation does not infer causation. Additionally, in my methodology class, one of the first lessons I learned was that a concept is what the test measures. Meaning that a variable becomes what you operationalize it to be. So do these variables actually represent different things, or are they new, fancy ways of naming one underling hypothetical construct?
Nina Pološki Vokić and I are conducting a study to test precisely that: how internal communication satisfaction and engagement relate to each other and whether they are related to job-organization fit and job-person fit. We used standardized, established and commonly used instruments to measure each concept. Discriminate validity of each of the concepts was very high. High correlations between composite measures of concepts (over .85) show that concepts overlap significantly and likely measure the same thing, and therefore cannot claim to measure different concepts. Most of our inter-correlations were above that level. These results can of course be attributed to other reasons which will be presented in our paper in detail. However, the question of popularity of the concept (there is an estimated investment of $720 million annually in engagement improvement), without it actually being defined or conceptualized, remains.
Maybe, before taking this concept further, academics should put some additional effort into clearing things up. What is engagement then? Is it focused on the employee or on the organization? How do we measure it? Is it a composition of factors or is it uni-dimensional? What causes it, and how is it related to performance? It is an important concept that needs to evolve, but on sound, empirical research instead of fancy improvisation.
Ana Tkalac Verčič, Ph.D., is professor of Marketing and Public Relations at the University of Zagreb.
