Leadership and Employee Engagement

The most important component of effective leadership is that leaders treat their employees genuinely & it encourages creativity and achieves continuing outcomes in organizations (Kouzes and Posner, 2002 cited in Wang and Hsieh, 2013). He further suggested that authentic leadership may positively affect employee engagement, attitudes and behavior, job commitment, creativity, and organizational citizenship behavior. When employees notice their supervisors as being consistent between words and actions and holding moral perceptions, they are more likely to be engaged in their work (Wang and Hsieh, 2013). Leaders’ openness and consistency between beliefs and actions play an important role in manipulating employees’ decisions to provide voluntarily comments or suggestions intended to spark organizational improvement, which in turn help them to learn and to be engaged at work (May, Chan, Hodges, & Avolio, 2003 cited in Wang and Hsieh, 2013).

According to Kompaso and Sridevi (2010), the concept of employee engagement begins from the top as it is impossible to have engaged people in organizations where there is no engaged leadership. Further Kompaso and Sridevi (2010) states that managers should enhance two-way communication and ensure that employees have all the resources they need to do their job. The leadership is responsible for providing appropriate training to employees to increase their knowledge and skill and establish reward mechanisms to reward good employee works as well as creating a distinctive corporate culture that encourages the hard work of employees. Leadership plays a big role in creating such an environment & keeps success stories alive while developing a strong performance management system. Any organization that has committed leadership can achieve the desired level of engagement with less cost of doing it.

The management of the company I work for always welcomes employees’ ideas & suggestions by creating an open-door culture & making them comfortable. They always keep the eye on the company vision & work according to it. As well as they trust their employees & provide almost all the facilities to make them engaged employees to achieve organization expectations. 

Video 04: 11 Things leaders say to drive Employee engagement

Source: Blessingwhite, A Division of GP strategies

Barriers to Employee engagement

There is also a growing focus upon identifying those factors that will limit employees’ ability to engage. Bureaucracy and heavy workloads can be identified as key factors (Robertson-Smith and Markwick 2009). Bureaucratic behavior in organizations severely slows down the potential of an organization to engage its employees, as well as being over‐worked, as both increase an employee’s vulnerability to stress (Lockwood, 2007). Workload pressure along with poor management and poor communication were key barriers to engagement. This was particularly true during times of change, with bureaucracy and lack of time to achieve workload being the biggest de‐motivators, and workload is one of the biggest causes of stress (Sinclair et al., 2008). The reliability and stability of the measures are in doubt as the individual’s level of engagement fluctuates with employees’ situation & environment (Fletcher and Robinson, 2014 cited in Purcell, 2014).

List of References

·       Lockwood NR (2007), ʹLeveraging employee engagement for competitive advantage: HR’s strategic roleʹ, Society for Human Resource Management Quarterly, ¼

·       Robertson-Smith, G. and Markwick, C. (2009) Employee Engagement A review of current thinking, Brighton: INSTITUTE FOR EMPLOYMENT STUDIES

·       Sinclair A, Robertson‐Smith G, Hennessy J (2008), The Management Agenda, Roffey Park Institute

·       Purcell, J. (2014). Disengaging from engagement. Human Resource Management Journal, 24(3), pp.241-254.

·       Wang, D. and Hsieh, C. (2013). The effect of authentic leadership on employee trust and employee engagement. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 41(4), pp.613-624.

·       Kompaso, S. and Sridevi, M. (2010). Employee Engagement: The Key to Improving Performance. International Journal of Business and Management, 5(12 )