Understanding Employee Engagement, 2nd Edition

2 WHAT IS EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171133-3

Employee engagement has been fiercely growing in popularity among practitioners, organizational leaders, and researchers in the organizational sciences over the last two decades. And why not? According to an article in Business Week magazine,

companies with engaged employees boosted operating income by 19% compared with companies with the lowest percentage of engaged employees, which saw operating income fall 33%. What does that mean in real dollars? For S&P 500 companies, Watson Wyatt reports that a significant improvement in employee engagement increases revenue by $95 million.

(Irvine, 2009)

Although astounding financial gains and losses are attributed to engaged ...