Employee engagement: systematization of approaches to the definition and measurement

Abstract

The popularity of the concept of employee engagement in the scientific community hasgrown significantly over the past few decades, many large companies have implemented it in practice, conducting regular engagement surveys. However, there is still no common understanding of the essence of this phenomenon, what it consists of, what factors influence its formation and how to measureit. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to systematize the approaches to defining and measuring employee engagement, proposed in scientific and professional publications, as well as to discuss methodological challenges and prospects in connection with the transformation of the context of work. Method. The first part of the article examines the most famous scientific approaches to the definition of engagement at work and related constructs, factors, and models of involvement, including appliedones, used by consulting companies. The second part focuses on the measurement of engagement. The third part discusses the new challenges facing employee engagement researchers and practitioners in the face of changing working conditions, most notably the wide spread use of digital technology and remote working accelerated by COVID-19 pandemic. The article is based on a review of scientific andprofessional literature and contains several elements of novelty. Findings. For the first time, a detailedanalysis of the main theoretical approaches to interpreting and measuring the “employee engagement” construct presented in foreign and domestic literature was carried out; the characteristics of the employee engagement models of consulting companies, which are used by practitioners in the field of organizational psychology, and human resource management, are given; the challenges in the field of conceptualization and methodology for measuring the employee engagement in the new conditions of doing business and organizing work were described. Value of results. The scientific significance of the article lies in the systematization of various areas of theoretical and empirical studies in foreign and domestic literature on employee engagement. HR managers can get from the article valuablein formation about the specific approaches of consulting companies involved in conducting employee engagement surveys, which can be used to interpret their results, and to design their own engagement surveys taking into account the company’s characteristics.