Journey of Engagement: From Personal Engagement to Employee Engagement (A Conceptual Review)
Abstract
Engagement has become the buzz word in organizations and majority of the companies are not only formulating strategies but effectively implementing to have highly engaged workforce. The notion of engagement came into existence from the ethnographic study of William Kahn since 1990. The research on engagement took pace only after 2006 when organisations started to realize the importance of engaged workforce. The corporate houses and academicians differ in terms of their understanding of the term. This construct was a problem in terms of its definition from the start itself and hence faces the “jangle fallacy”, that it is a new construct to be studied or an old wine in a new bottle. Thus, the purpose of the study was to understand the notion of engagement from its definitional perspective and identify its main dimensions. The researchers adopted the Literature Review to achieve the objective of the study. We were also able to identify and delineate the four main constructs which were in line with the past studies i.e. “personal engagement, burnout Vs engagement, work engagement and employee engagement”. The reviews also revealed that the factors given by Kahn were immersive and are still relevant from the HRD perspective, as they are pivotal for the organisations to have engaged employees.