A selection of interesting articles we came across recently on engaging the organisation.

Collective organizational engagement: Linking motivational antecedents, strategic implementation, and firm performance.
Murray Barrick and his colleagues present a comprehensive theory of collective organizational engagement, integrating engagement theory with the resource management model. They propose that engagement can be considered an organization-level construct influenced by motivationally focused organizational practices that represent firm-level resources.

Specifically, the authors evaluate three distinct organizational practices as resources—motivating work design, human resource management practices, and CEO transformational leadership—that can facilitate perceptions that members of the organization are as a whole physically, cognitively, and emotionally invested at work. Their theory is grounded in the notion that, when used jointly, these organizational resources maximize each of the three underlying psychological conditions necessary for full engagement; namely, psychological meaningfulness, safety, and availability. The resource management model also underscores the value of top management team members implementing and monitoring progress on the firm’s strategy as a means to enhance the effects of organizational resources on collective organizational engagement.

The researchers empirically test this theory in a sample of 83 firms, and provide evidence that collective organizational engagement mediates the relationship between the three organizational resources and firm performance. Furthermore, they found that strategic implementation positively moderates the relationship between the three organizational resources and collective organizational engagement. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Read more: Murray R. Barrick, Gary R. Thurgood, Troy A. Smith and Stephen H. Courtright. 2015. Collective organizational engagement: Linking motivational antecedents, strategic implementation, and firm performance.
Academy of Management Journal, 58(1), 111-135.

 

Mid-management, employee engagement, and CSR
This paper explains how middle managers might enlist ethically engaged employees into the production of reliable, sustainable CSR. An accompanying model illustrates how those managers can encounter employee engagement in CSR and channel their enthusiasm effectively. It presents factors scaffolding organizational support for employee engagement and how they relate to the intensity of that engagement. It introduces the importance of employee voice and illustrates how associated signals might be captured.

Read more: Lynn Godkin. 2015. Mid-management, employee engagement, and the generation of reliable sustainable corporate social responsibility.
Journal of Business Ethics, 2015, 130(1), 15-28.

 

Enhancing frontline staff engagement
Nurses play a critical role in care transformation. To achieve transformation, frontline staff must be engaged in their work, committed to their organization’s mission, and capable of delivering high-quality care. Data from the Advisory Board Survey Solutions show that nurses are both the least engaged and most disengaged among all frontline staff. To identify the most promising opportunities for driving engagement, researchers from The Advisory Board Company analyzed engagement survey responses from more than 343,000 employees at 575 healthcare organizations. This article describes 3 strategies for addressing one of the greatest opportunities identified from the data: ensuring that nurses feel that their ideas and suggestions are valued by the organization.

Read more: Sarah Strumwasser and Katherine Virkstis. 2015. Meaningfully incorporating staff input to enhance frontline engagement.
Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(4), 179-182. 

 

The effects of organizational alignment–employee engagement linkages on individual performance.
Meera Alagaraja and Brad Shuck explore existing perspectives of organizational alignment and employee engagement from the literature to better understand the alignment-engagement linkages to individual performance. This is an underexplored area of inquiry in human resource development (HRD). Their analysis of the alignment and engagement literatures resulted in the development of an exploratory conceptual model. The conceptual model elaborates on the organizational alignment–employee engagement linkages and their impact on individual performance. These interconnections emphasize the importance of developing internally consistent HRD interventions or programs that align individual skills and knowledge with job characteristics and organizational systems and routines. Furthermore, the model highlights the dynamic nature of the alignment-engagement linkages both as a source and context, which facilitates individual performance, and influences the extent to which employees exhibit essential as well as discretionary behaviors. The authors elaborate on the implications for HRD theory, research, and practice.

Read more: Meera Alagaraja and Brad Shuck. 2015. Exploring Organizational Alignment-Employee Engagement Linkages and Impact on Individual Performance: A Conceptual Model.
Human Resource Development Review, 14(1), 17-37.