The Nature of Employee Engagement: New Conceptual and Empirical Considerations of the Employee-Organization Relationship (original) (raw)
Research interest in the new concept of employee engagement has grown dramatically in recent years. Employee engagement represents an affective, motivational, workrelated state of mind characterized by feelings of vigor, fulfillment, enthusiasm, absorption and dedication. However, scholars are still ambivalent about its theoretical contribution to explaining the employee-organization relationship. The goal of the study is to strengthen the theoretical foundation of the employee engagement concept in order to determine whether it is a new concept or simply a repackaging of similar constructs. We first compared employee engagement to other close concepts such as psychological empowerment and psychological contract. We then examined its contribution to the explanation of work centrality over and above psychological empowerment and psychological contract. Our study is based on an interactive sample of 593 employees from both private and public organizations in Israel. Our findings demonstrate that the correlated three-factor structure of employee engagement is empirically distinct from psychological empowerment and psychological contract in both the private and public sectors and has an incremental value for work centrality over and above psychological empowerment and psychological contract. Implications of our findings are discussed the light of the employee-organization relationship.
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