Job satisfaction and organizational commitment don’t measure engagement but effective tools are starting to emerge
Engagement has become a popular topic in recent years. More reports are claiming work engagement predicts employee attitudes and performance, organizational success and financial performance.
However, the academic community has only recently begun to study engagement so most of what has been written comes from consulting firms. As a result, work engagement has been defined and measured in many ways and the definitions and measures are often similar to better-known and established variables such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job involvement.
A recent article in Canadian HR Reporter (“The promise of engagement: Examining myths, truths,” Dec. 1, 2008) pointed out many popular engagement surveys do not actually measure engagement. Rather, they measure job satisfaction or factors that might predict or create a sense of engagement.
The article suggests it is time to examine other more productive ways of measuring and promoting engagement in organizations. However, the article’s solution is to use a well-known measure of affective organizational commitment to measure engagement. But this is exactly the problem: Measures of organizational commitment such as job satisfaction do not provide a direct measure of engagement.
Organizational commitment is an attitude that reflects the strength of the linkage between an employee and an organization. But using a measure of organizational commitment to measure work engagement is not just a bad idea — it’s bad science.
If we really want to know something about employee engagement, we need a valid measure of engagement. After all, how can you know if employees are engaged if you measure organizational commitment? How can you compare the engagement of your employees to employees in other organizations if you measured organizational commitment and others measured something else? And how can you know anything about the drivers and consequences of engagement if you have not really measured engagement? Clearly, unless you believe organizational commitment is the same thing as work engagement, then you should use different measures for each of them.
The measurement of engagement
Fortunately, the science of engagement is catching up with the practice of engagement. In the academic literature, work engagement has been defined as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterized by vigour, dedication and absorption. Vigour involves high levels of energy and mental resilience while working. Dedication refers to being strongly involved in your work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm and challenge. Absorption is being fully concentrated and engrossed in your work.
A measure of work engagement called the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) has been developed to measure these three dimensions. Sample items for the three are as follows:
Vigour: “At my work, I feel bursting with energy.”
Dedication: “I find the work I do full of meaning and purpose.”
Absorption: “When I am working, I forget everything else around me.”
By comparison, a sample item from the affective organizational commitment scale is: “I would be very happy to spend the rest of my career with this organization.”
So the focus of engagement is the job whereas the focus of organizational commitment is the organization.
The drivers of engagement
Reports on engagement have provided a long list of possible drivers and outcomes. In the academic literature, a model known as the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model has received the most attention for understanding the predictors and consequences of work engagement.
According to the JD-R model, the work environment can be divided into demands and resources. Job demands refer to physical, psychological, social or organizational features of a job that require sustained physical or psychological effort from an employee that can result in physiological or psychological costs. Common job demands include work overload, job insecurity, role ambiguity and role conflict.
Job resources refer to physical, psychological, social or organizational features of a job that are functional in that they help achieve work goals, reduce job demands and stimulate personal growth, learning and development. Job resources can come from the organization (such as pay, career opportunities, job security), interpersonal and social relations (supervisor and co-worker support, team climate), the organization of work (role clarity, participation in decision-making) and from the task itself (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, performance feedback).
Research on the JD-R model has found job resources such as social support from colleagues and supervisors, performance feedback, autonomy and learning opportunities are positively related to work engagement. In addition, job resources act as buffers to diminish the negative effect of job demands on work engagement, and work engagement is positively related to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour, job performance and intentions to remain. On the other hand, job demands are related to burnout, disengagement and health problems.
Still a lot to learn
If we are to move forward in both the science and practice of engagement, we need to use valid measures of engagement that are distinct from other better-known variables. There is nothing to be gained from measuring organizational commitment and job satisfaction and pretending you have measured work engagement.
Alan Saks is a professor of human resources management at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, University of Toronto.
