Effect of Change on Employee Engagement

Effect of Change on Employee Engagement

Izhar Malik

Fall 2016

Abstract

Employee engagement has gained considerable popularity over the last two decades among human resource development consultants, practitioners, and, business conference presenters but questions persist regarding whether engagement is just a fashionable term, is it sufficiently defined by theory and how is it affected in times of continuous change. A quick google lookup turns almost a million links on the term, including research work by several professional/academic bodies. The concept of employee engagement is apparently as significant for corporate world as it is for the professional bodies and consulting groups who promote it. The results from employee engagement programs conducted by various consulting groups are aimed at producing an effective and engaged workforce, who is productive, loyal and more willing to contribute to achieving business objectives. In turn, this highly productive and engaged workforce is then demanded and retained by the organizations as human intellectual asset (Gallup, 2016).

More recently, there is an interesting aspect to the dilemma of employee engagement in face of continuous change in organizations and application of open system model. The “Open Systems Model” is based on open systems theory, which perceives organizations as units that interact with their external environment rather than being closed and independent units (Swanson & Holton, 2009). Therefore Organizations in 21st century need to adopt a continuous change strategy to cope with challenging and multifaceted external environment embedded with unpredictable economical situations, fierce competition and technological advancements. The purpose of this literature review is to establish a relationship between organizational continuous change phenomenon and employee engagement and what best practices can be adopted for employee engagement during those change programs/times. Conclusions/results are drawn from the literature review for the identified research questions and in the end, implications for further research, theory, and practice are discussed.

Introduction

There is wealth of knowledge and resources available for practitioners to gain insights on the employee engagement. Myriad organizations and consulting firms played active role in the awareness and promotion of employee engagement in companies. Few professional bodies who made noteworthy contributions in this field are the “Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Association for Talent Development (ATD), and the Gallup organization. It was after the popularity of the book “First Break All the Rules” (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999) that gave employee engagement concept an overnight boost in the corporate consulting world.