Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Engagement for a Diverse Workforce

Abstract

In the recent years, employee engagement has become a hot topic of discussion among popular business press and consulting firms. This topic has created interest in various stakeholder groups ranging from scholarly human resource practitioners to policy makers or government agencies. The interest in employee engagement has progressively increased, however, in academic literature: the concept of employee engagement has been studied rarely and comparatively less is known regarding its antecedents and consequences. Recently, a number of researchers have argued that the challenge of engaging the employees is mounting. Although it seems to conceptually overlap with existing constructs, for instance, job involvement, organizational commitment, still some empirical research confirms that engagement is a separate construct. Therefore, this chapter aims (a) to shed some light in this respect by assessing the association between workforce diversity, specifically in terms of their age and employee engagement, and (b) to provide a variety of precursors and outcomes of employee engagement.