Employee engagement has been defined in many different ways. How do you define it?
Very often, the definitions of employee engagement sound more like definitions for ‘organizational commitment’ or ‘job satisfaction’. Engagement is not those things. The best definition comes from the first major study on the topic by William Kahn at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. The paper came out in 1990, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that people started to pay attention to it. According to Kahn, engagement is “the extent to which people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively and emotionally when performing a task or job.” We often say that when people are engaged, they bring all aspects of themselves into the performance of whatever it is they are doing. Overall, it is a multi-dimensional motivational state.
Talk a bit about the state at the opposite end of the spectrum: burnout.
Both burnout and disengagement result from two things: high job demands and limited resources. On the flip side, high engagement, strong job performance are features of a role that can have physiological or psychological costs to the employee. Things like work overload, job insecurity, role ambiguity, time pressure and role conflict. are features of a role that help the individual achieve their work goals. They reduce job demands and encourage growth and learning, and include things like having autonomy over how you perform your job, receiving timely feedback and having social support and task variety.
