Employee Engagement and Commitment

Employee commitment and engagement are ambiguous terms and are commonly used by human resource (HR) practitioners and academic researchers in reference to a specific dimension of practice (Macey and Schneider, 2008). These terms are commonly used in diverse times to explain psychological state, characteristics, attribute as well as behaviors in perceiving their antecedents and results. Researchers are slowly establishing a joint approach between the terms through establishment of a meaningful construct on their application (Chalofsky and Krishna, 2009). Organizational approach suggests a positive relationship between employee commitment and engagement and the overall organizational output. Employee engagement has been positively linked to improved profitability, better work relations, increased productivity, and satisfaction of customers as well as high retention of employees (Yalabik et al, 2014). Some researchers however view employee engagement as having developed from work perceptions implying that the more recent notion is interpretative and extends beyond the spectrum of the term through inclusion of diverse implications. The concept of employee commitment and engagement has experienced rapid evolution within the practitioners’ fraternity leading to unclear definition of the construct. This has been partially influenced by relative evolution of applied organizational psychology construct (Shuck, 2011).

Sonenshein and Dholakia (2012) indicate that employee engagement is a term that developed in 21st century and has proved useful to the HR practitioners in organizations. The term seems to integrate various pertinent HR aspects such as employee involvement, job satisfaction, job design as well as motivation. According to Yalabik et al (2014), employee engagement depicts change in organizational approach to employees and the anticipations of the employees in their employers. These terms have been facilitated by the changing trends in employee job satisfaction and motivational factors where individuals are currently looking for personal accomplishments in their careers and not only inspired by the financial incentives…”