Employee Engagement as Motivation: Implications for HRM theory, methods,
and practice
Abstract
Perhaps the central theoretical construct in human resource management
today is employee engagement. Despite its centrality, clear theoretical
and operational definitions are few and far between, with most
treatments failing to separate causes from effects, psychological
variables from organizational variables, and internal from external
mechanisms. This paper argues for a more sophisticated approach to the
engagement concept, grounding it in the vast psychological literature on
human motivation. Herein lies the contribution of our paper; we argue
that the apparent diversity of operational definitions employed by
academics and practitioners can be understood as tentative attempts to
draw ever nearer to key motivational concepts, but never quite get
there. We review the leading definitions of employee engagement in the
literature and find that they are reducible to a core set of human
motives, each backed by full literatures of their own, which populate a
comprehensive model of twelve human motivations. We propose that there
is substantial value in adopting a comprehensive motivational taxonomy
over current atheoretical approaches, which have the effect of
“snowballing” ever more constructs adopted from a variety of fields
and theoretical traditions. We consider the impact of rooting engagement
concepts in existing motivational construct for each of the following:
(a) theory, especially the development of engagement systems; (b)
methods, including the value of applying a comprehensive, structural
approach; and (c) practice, where we emphasize the practical advantages
of clear operational definitions.