Creating a Culture of Engagement -- Insights for Application

Abstract

Harvard’s Clayton M. Christensen (2012, 2013, 2016) has repeatedly emphasized the critical importance of engaging employees at all organizational levels to achieve and sustain competitive advantage in today’s fast moving global marketplace. At the same time, other scholars have noted that many leaders and organizations are ineffective (Pfeffer, 1998) and Angela Duckworth (2016) has reported that two-thirds of today’s employees describe themselves as not engaged in their organization. The challenge of creating a culture of engagement and commitment has increasingly been addressed by scholars and practitioners and acknowledged to be critical to the success of the modern organization (Hayes, Caldwell, Licona & Meyer, 2015; Caldwell, Licona, & Floyd, 2015; Schein, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical importance of creating a culture of engagement and to clarify key roles of the top management team, the human resources staff, individual supervisors, and non-supervisory colleagues in creating that culture. We begin this paper by briefly defining employee engagement and explaining its important place in organizations that seek to improve quality, profitability, and innovation. We then identify the important roles of key individuals and groups in creating a culture of engagement and offer six propositions to test related to increasing employee commitment and creating a culture of high engagement. We conclude with a brief summary of the contributions of this paper.