Engagement FAQ
Menu of questions: How valuable is employee engagement? How difficult is it to achieve high employee engagement? What is engaging leadership? What is the historical background of engaging leadership? How can engaging leadership improve performance? How is engaging leadership related to followership? What is relevant literature about engagement?
How valuable is employee engagement? Research performed during the last decade (mainly practitioner-oriented research by major consulting firms such as Bersin/Deloitte, Corporate Executive Board, DDI, Gallup, Hewitt,
Manpower, Mercer, and Towers Watson, see Kowske, 2012) has shown an impressive array of positive relationships between employee engagement and such outcomes as: discretionary effort innovation customer service customer loyalty quality cooperation speed revenues profitability earnings per share productivity retention health and well-being What other single performance factor than engagement can provide as broad set of valuable effects? We have yet to find any. It is not surprising that employee engagement has become the number one metric in large US organizations’ HR scorecards, reported even more often than personnel turnover and performance ratings (Wellins et al, 2005; Kowske, 2012). See “What is relevant literature on engagement?� for the full references.
Why is it hard to create and retain employee engagement? Even though engagement is so valuable and gets so much attention, several studies such as Wellins, Bernthal, and Phelps (2005), BlessingWhite (2011), Kowske (2012), Gallup (2013) show employee engagement levels as low as only 10-35%. So why is employee engagement so difficult to achieve? First, by measuring engagement through anonymous mass-surveys once a year without any personal feedback to the respondents themselves, organizations are missing the fact that engagement is personal, dynamic, and can be improved through constructive sharing. Thus, it is not as simple as organizations merely having to measure engagement in order to increase it. The lack of personal feedback can even reduce engagement instead. Second, people have very different engagement drivers and killers, which undermine general attempts to engage whole groups (Larsson & Korch, 2012). Unfortunately, neither managers nor even persons themselves know well what really engage versus disengage them the most. For example, managers systematically overvalue monetary rewards, while undervaluing intrinsic rewards, such as job content, working environment, and understanding (cf Pink, 2010). Third, more than 60% of us are striving to develop our careers in directions that we think ought to be ideal, but actually are not the most motivating for us (Larsson & Kling, 2013). See “What is relevant literature on engagement?” for the full references.
What is engaging leadership? The concept of engaging leadership was coined by Mintzberg (2004) as a preferred contrast to the calculating and heroic leadership styles touted in MBA education, which he aimed mainly to critique. However, neither he, nor almost anybody else have yet pursued this very promising way of specifically aiming leadership towards engaging as many employees/followers as possible. We define engaging leadership as seeing, appreciating, trusting, and deploying the various motivating talents of one’s direct reports (Larsson & Kling, 2013). It aims to overcome frequent talent blind spots, lack of appreciation, and distrust that tend to disengage people by identifying their various personal engagement drivers and killers. The Engagement Guide™: The Engaging Ways to Leadership and Career Development (Larsson & Kling, 2015) combines one book on engaging leadership through five steps towards greater sustainable performance with a complementary book on engaging career development. Both these books are published together as one title and are based upon Decision Dynamics Engagement Compass™ and Career Model™. See “What is relevant literature on engagement?” for the full references.
What is the historical background of engaging leadership? Larsson, Månsson, and Sahlberg (2011) have related engaging leadership to a historical development of different leadership theories and styles in the figure below. A first step was taken by McGregor (1960), when he contrasted the traditional scientific management as the control-oriented Theory X with the motivationally oriented Theory Y. Internal marketing is another way of “sell, not tell” leadership that can traced as far back as Gulick (1937). It can also be seen as a step towards more situational adaptation, since selling leadership needs to take into account the different people one is leading.
This was taken several steps further by situational leadership (Hershey & Blanchard, 1977) that matches 4 different leadership styles (tell, sell, participate, and delegate) to the maturity of the group. A more recent development is coaching leadership (Goleman, 2000) that adds more motivational, pedagogic, and emotional strengths. It has become so popular that many view it as the ultimate leadership style. However, Goleman’s original intention was rather for it to one out of six leadership styles (the others being commanding, visionary, affiliative, democratic, and pacesetting) to suit different situations and people. This situational limitation of coaching leadership as a popular universal approach actually highlights the primary value added of engaging leadership. The first academic reference to it that we have found is Mintzberg (2004), who coined it as a preferred contrast to the calculating and heroic leadership styles touted in MBA education. However, Mintzberg’s main purpose was to critique the MBA education and neither he, nor almost anybody else, have pursued this very promising way of specifically aim leadership to engage as many employees/followers as possible. In sum, engaging leadership builds upon the situational strengths of traditional situational leadership with the motivational, pedagogic, and emotional strengths of coaching leadership to adapt different leadership approaches to engage more varieties of persons.
See “What is relevant literature on engagement?” for the full references.
How can engaging leadership improve performance? Decision Dynamics has developed the following five-step approach towards more engaging leadership (Larsson & Kling, 2013; 2015): 1. Individually engaging career development – Discover your own engagement drivers and killers through better self-awareness, assuming greater responsibility for your own engagement, and thereby acting as a role model that radiates more engagement to your direct reports. 2. Engaging leadership of your direct reports – Improve your managerial chemistry by seeing, appreciating, trusting, and deploying the motivating talents of your direct reports based on finding out their engagement drivers and killers and communicating in ways that suit them. 3. Engaging job roles – Develop job roles that better utilize the co-worker talents by focusing on the most important and motivating competencies. At the same time, exchange some of the most disengaging everyday activities for more of the most engaging activities. This may increase the co-worker’s performancies with 40-80% greater efficiency, quality, cooperation, and speed. 4. Engaging teamwork – Utilize the diversity of your team for better mutual understanding of one another’s engagement drivers and killers, thereby building more sustainable cooperation with less destructive conflicts and other negative diffusion of misunderstandings, devaluation, and distrust. 5. Engaging culture – Contribute to an organizational culture with more motivating performance appraisal factors and rewards (especially intrinsic, non-monetary rewards like recognition and suitable development) instead of carrot and stick pressures to perform. These five steps towards more engaging leadership are discussed further in the leadership part of the Engagement Guide™ as well as complemented by five corresponding steps towards more engaging career development. See “What is relevant literature on engagement?” for the full references.
How is engaging leadership related to followership? Followership theory has been developed to complement leadership theory. Given that only about 10% of employees are formal leaders, there is a great need to also address the other 90% with knowledge that can contribute to more synergistic interaction between leaders and co-workers. A leading reference and HBR classic is Kelley’s “In Praise of Followers” (1988). It separates followers in terms of if they think for themselves and if they are engaged in creating positive, passive or negative energy. This resulted in the five followership styles of “sheep”, “alienated”, “yes people”, “pragmatic” and “effective followers”, that unfortunately classify all the non-managerial, individual contributors into one good and four bad, disengaging follower categories.
Engaging leadership is much better complemented by a more engaging way to view coworkers. This is found in a career development approach that is relevant to all working people and categorizes them according to which direction they want to develop and how long time period they want to stay in one field of work. In this way we put each person in the center to understand them from their respective perspective, instead of classifying them as good or various bad followers from a mostly devaluing leader perspective. The Engagement Guide™ (Larsson & Kling, 2015) highlights the engaging complementarity of leadership and career development by combining them as two books that are printed together with each one having a front page, where the reader can chose which side to begin with. Having read either the engaging leadership or the engaging career development side first, the reader discovers the added value of turning the combined book upside down and read the other complementary side. These two leadership and career development sides of the Engagement Guide™ meet in the middle of the combined book with two golden rules for managers and co-workers that help one another to engage themselves and others more. This makes career development a much more engaging complementary perspective to leaderhip than Kelley’s traditional followership theory. See “What is relevant literature on engagement?” for the full references.
What is relevant literature about engagement? List of References on Engagement, Leadership, and Career Development BlessingWhite (2008) State of employee engagement 2008. Princeton, NJ: BlessingWhite Research. BlessingWhite (2011) Employee engagement report 2011. Princeton, NJ: BlessingWhite Research. Brousseau, K (1984) “Job-person dynamics and career development”, in Rowland, K. and Ferris, G. (Eds.) Research in Personnel and Human Resources, JAI Press, Greenwich, Vol 2, pp. 125-154. Brousseau, K & Driver, M (1994) “Enhancing Informed Choice: A Career-Concepts Approach to Career Advisement”, Selections, Spring, pp. 24-31. Brousseau, K, Driver, M, Eneroth, K & Larsson, R (1996) “Career Pandemonium: Realigning organisations and individuals”, Academy of Management Executive, Vol 10 No 4, pp. 52-66. Brousseau, K, Driver, M, Hourihan, G & Larsson, R (2006) “The seasoned executive’s decision-making style”, Harvard Business Review, Vol 84 No 2, pp. 111-121. Coombs, M (1989) Measuring Career Concepts: An examination of the concepts, constructs, and validity of the Career Concept Questionnaire, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Decision Dynamics AB (2011) Everyday engagement: Discover the great potential of everyday work engagement. Decision Dynamics Research Nuggets 2011:1. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics
Decision Dynamics AB (2012) Turn the downside of our weekly engagement curve into results. Decision Dynamics Research Nuggets 2012:2. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics Derr, B (1986) Managing the new careerists. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Driver, M (1979) Career concepts and career management in organizations, in Cooper, C. (Ed.) Behavioral problems in organizations, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, pp. 5-17. Driver, M (1980) Career concepts and organizational change, in Derr, B. (Ed.) Work, Family and the Career. New York: Praeger, pp. 31-41. Driver, M & Coombs, M (1983) Fit between career concepts, corporate culture and engineering productivity and morale, IEEE Conference on Careers. Gallup (2013) State of the global workplace: Employee engagement insights for business leaders worldwide. www.gallup.com . Goleman, D (2000) Leadership that gets results. Harvard Business Review, 78 (2), 78-90. Hay Group (2010) Employee engagement and enablement critical. Philadelphia: Hay Group Hersey, P & Blanchard, K (1977) Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human resources. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kelley, R (1988) “In Praise of Followers”, Harvard Business Review, 66, 142-148. Kenexa Research Institute (2008) Engaging the employee: A Kenexa Research Institute Work Trends Report. Kowske, B (2012) Employee engagement: Market review, buyer’s guide, and provider profiles. Oakland, CA: Bersin & Associates Industry Study. Larsson, R, Brousseau, K, Driver, M, Holmqvist, M & Tarnovskaya, V (2003) International growth through cooperation: Brand-driven strategies, leadership, and career development in Sweden, Academy of Management Executive, Vol 17 No 1, pp. 7-24. Larsson, R, Brousseau, K, Kling, K & Sweet, P (2007) Building motivational capital through Career concept and culture fit: The strategic value of developing motivation and retention, Career Development International, Vol 12 No 4, pp. 361-381. Larsson, R, Driver, M, Holmqvist, M & Sweet, P (2001) Career disintegration and reintegration in mergers and acquisitions: Managing competence and motivational intangibles, European Management Journal, Vol 19 No 6, pp. 609-618. Larsson, R & Duval Thomsen, Y (2013) Decision styles, leadership, and engagement: Decision Dynamics conference report from CfL’s Leadership festival. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics. Larsson, R & Kling, K (2013) How Training & Development Can Engage More People to Learn and Perform Better while Staying Longer. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics Research Report 2013:1.
Larsson, R & Kling, K (2015) The Engagement Guide: The Engaging Ways to Leadership and Career Development. Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics. Larsson, R & Korch, G (2012) Mer engagemang kan öka kvalitet, effektivitet, samverkan och snabbhet med 65-90%! Resultat från deltagarundersökningen med Engagemangskompassen på KvalitetsMagasinet Live (Translation: More engagement can increase quality, efficiency, cooperation, and speed with 65-90%! Results from the participant survey with The Engagement Compass KvalitetsMagasinet Live conference). Lund, Sweden: Decision Dynamics. Larsson, R, Månsson, A & Sahlberg, S (2011) Breakthrough in Lundian business student career development: Pilot project in discovering one’s most engaging employers, jobs, development, and rewards. Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Lund University. Lombardo, M & Eichinger, R (1996) The career architect development planner. Minneapolis: Lominger. Macey W & Schneider B (2008) The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol 1, pp 3-30. McGregor, D (1960) The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mercer (2011) Inside employees’ minds: Navigating the new rules of engagement, US Survey Summary – June 2011. New York: Mercer. Mintzberg, H (2004) Managers not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Pink, D (2010) Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburg, Great Britain: Canongate. Schein, E (1978) Career dynamics: Matching individual and organizational needs, Addison-Wesley, Reading. SHRM/Globoforce (2012) The business impact of employee recognition. SHRM/Globoforce Fall Report. Von Glinow, M, Driver, M, Brousseau, K & Prince, B (1983) The design of a career oriented human resource system, Academy of Management Review, Vol 8 No 1, pp. 23-32. Wellins, R, Bernthal, P & Phelps, M (2005) Employee engagement: The key to realizing competitive advantage. DDI Development Dimensions International Inc.