A study on employee engagement and cultural intelligence in supervisors.

Abstract

Employee engagement is a popular concept and a commonly used term. An engaged employee is enthusiastic about his or her work and thus will act in a way that furthers the organization’s interests. This is supported by a meta-analysis conducted by Harter, Schmidt and Hayes [2002] that shows a significant positive relationship between employee engagement and business-level performance, beyond the impact of management skills. However, it is noted that engagement had varying measures among the academics and the practitioners. The inconsistency in measurements would then lead to inconclusiveness regarding its implications and antecedents, as far as engagement is concerned. Hence, this experimental study investigates how employee engagement, measured differently by the academics and the practitioners, relates to antecedents and behavioral outcome of engagement. Engagement should also be examined in the context of a multicultural workforce in today’s globalised economy. The findings of employee engagement studies can no longer represent the voice of a homogeneous workforce.