Employee Engagement And Job Enlargement

While most people agree that employee engagement is a real, definable concept, there is a lack of uniformity on exactly how to define it. Yet, most definitions encompass two key facets: the degree to which employees fully occupy themselves in their work and apply discretionary effort, as well as the strength of their commitment to the employer and role. Stated another way, employee engagement is the extent to which employees commit to something or someone in their organization and how hard they work and how long they stay as a result of that commitment.

Evidence that employee engagement drives improved business results continues to mount. The momentum started in the 1990s in no small part due to a seminal article in HBR entitled Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work. The article united, for the

Early research on job design has shown the beneficial effects of job enlargement (broadening the scope of job tasks) and job enrichment (providing more complex and challenging tasks) to job satisfaction and work motivation. More recent research shows that specific job characteristics, like skill variety, task identity, task significance (which collectively contribute to a sense of work meaningfulness), autonomy and performance feedback are also critical components that promote motivation, personal responsibility and job satisfaction—in short,

Changing employee attitudes by fine-tuning attributes of their work environment are no doubt helpful in building an engaged workforce, but they are insufficient. In order to create, preserve, and capitalize on an engaged workforce, additional actions around job design will be required. Without effective job design, it is unlikely that real employee behavior change will be sustained over the long