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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Mutual Gains? The Role for Employee Engagement in the Modern Workplace

Author : Alex Bryson

Published in: Rethinking Entrepreneurial Human Capital

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

I examine the history of employee engagement and how it has been characterised by thinkers in sociology, psychology, management and economics. I suggest that, while employers may choose to invest in employee engagement, there are alternative management strategies that may be profit-maximising. I identify four elements of employee engagement—job ‘flow’, autonomous working, involvement in decision-making at workplace or firm level, and financial participation—and present empirical evidence on their incidence and employee perceptions of engagement, drawing primarily from evidence in Britain. I consider the evidence regarding the existence of mutual gains and present new evidence on the issue. I find a non-linear relationship between human resource management (HRM) intensity and various employee job attitudes. I also find the intensity of HRM use and employee engagement are independently associated with improvements in workplace performance. I consider the implications of the findings for policy and employment practice in the future.

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Smith (1776) says “the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become…But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it”.

Blauner (1966) famously describes the degree of job autonomy and control afforded an operative in a continuous process plant by virtue of technological advances. Braverman (1974), on the other hand, maintains that the profit motive imbues capitalism with an imperative to deskill labour, even if new technologies offer alternative possibilities.

Together with Google, Apple is often cited as the “poster child” for modern, innovative, and creative production in the IT world, whereas Foxconn is best known for the suicide rates among workers on the i-Phone production line https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

People who downloaded the Mappiness app receive randomly timed ‘dings’ on their phone to request that they complete a very short survey. They are asked to rate how happy they feel and how relaxed they are; whether they are alone and, if not, whom they are with; whether they are indoors, outdoors or in a vehicle; and whether they are at home, at work or elsewhere. Finally, they are asked what they were doing ‘just now’.

Furthermore, there is an earlier smaller study from the United States using the Day Reconstruction Method which obtains similar findings (Kahneman et al. 2004).

A lively debate is on-going. Mike Ashley, owner and CEO of Sports Direct, has proposed worker representation on its board but the proposal has been met by scepticism given the company’s track record on worker rights https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/09/sports-direct-workers-representative-mike-ashley. The UK government are consulting over proposals for worker involvement in corporate governance https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/584013/corporate-governance-reform-green-paper.pdf

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In an on-going study of employees in a multi-national firm with an all-employee share ownership plan I find that half the members and ex-members of the ESOP had never voted in the firm’s annual general meeting and a further one-in-ten did not know whether they had or not. Of those who had voted, one-in-three followed others’ recommendations when voting.

The terms “high-involvement”, “high commitment” and “engagement” have been used interchangeably in the literature. However, as we discuss in Section Two above, “high-involvement” management practices might reasonably be viewed as a subset of employee engagement practices—that part linked to decision-making at the job, workplace or firm-level. Commitment, on the other hand, as we discuss later, might be regarded as a job attitude which, alongside job satisfaction, can be an outcome from employee engagement.

The forerunner to the ‘fit’ perspective is the resource based view (RBV) of the firm which emphasises the need for firms to manage human, physical and organizational resources to succeed (Saridakis et al. 2017: 88–89).

The HRM domains are described in detail in Appendix (Table 4).

The p values for the joint significance tests range from 0.00 in the case of job autonomy to 0.03 for managerial employee engagement.

P values for their joint significance range from 0.016 to 0.022.

Mean employee perceptions of employers’ ability to engage employees was statistically significant in all the labour productivity models and in none of the models for financial performance or quality.

One needs to be cautious when extrapolating from Britain, or indeed, any single country when considering the incidence and correlates of employee engagement because cross-country studies indicate that HRM practices and job quality can vary quite markedly across as well as within European countries (Bryson et al. 2017a, b, c; Green and Mostafa 2012).

See, for example, the UK government’s response to a consultation regarding worker representation in corporate governance https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/640631/corporate-governance-reform-government-response.pdf

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Title: Mutual Gains? The Role for Employee Engagement in the Modern Workplace
Author: Alex Bryson
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Rethinking Entrepreneurial Human Capital
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90547-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-90548-8

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90548-8_3