Abstracts: June 6th, 2011

This report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development delves deep into the issue of employee engagement. It acknowledges that employee engagement is an important driver of sustainable organisation performance, but goes further by exploring ‘what’ employees engage with and ‘where’ in the organisation their focus of engagement is located, or what is their ‘locus of engagement’.

The report reveals that despite the plethora of research around the issue of employee engagement, very little attention has as yet been paid to what exactly it is employees engage with. An analysis of their research data provides evidence not only that employees engage with a variety of different aspects of their work, but that these vary both in depth and intensity over time and can impact on organisational performance.

Engagement was identified as a major driver of performance in the CIPD Shaping the Future research programme, but evidence was also suggesting that over-engagement with particular facets of the job could impact negatively on organisational agility and flexibility.

The report is available for download.