Employee engagement is a complex paradigm that is shaped by a variety of factors in the
workplace environment, the managing organisation and its employees. One’s engagement to their
workplace actuates the amount of commitment and personal alignment with the organisation’s
goals, which in turn determines the overall performance of the organisation. Since different
organisations employ different methods of improving such a relationship, the observation of
variances and its effects can assist in the study of how employee engagement can be improved.
Highly engaged employees are more devoted and loyal to the organisation, creating mutually
beneficial effects such as greater organisational effectiveness and more satisfied workers. As such, it
is in organisations’ best interest to improve employee engagement, the pursuit of which have led to
the study of the factors influencing it and possible ways of implementing such methods through the
calibration of intrinsic and extrinsic circumstances in the workplace.
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Employee engagement pertains to the workers’ attitude and personal commitment towards
their work, which has significant implications on their job satisfaction and working effectiveness.
Research shows that highly engaged employees exhibit greater commitment to the organisation and
its goals, leading to increased job satisfaction, while being more likely to display proactive behaviour
through the participation of extra-role tasks (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004, in Masvaure et al., 2014).
Engagement itself is a dynamic property, and can be increased through the utilisation of the human
resources management (HRM) practices (Jafri, 2013) – an example being the “drivers of
engagement”. Such drivers include the employee’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, responsibility,
task significance, and job satisfaction (Arrowsmith & Parker, 2013) – all of which work in conjunction
in the form of ‘hard’ –...