Defining and measuring work engagement: Bringing clarity to the concept

Engagement has become a rather popular term, first in business and consultancy, and recently also in academia. The origin of the term “employee engagement” is not entirely clear, but most likely it was first used in the 1990s by the Gallup organization (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999). Although the phrases “employee engagement” and “work engagement” are typically used interchangeably we prefer the latter because it is more specific. Namely, work engagement refers to the relationship of the employee with his or her work, whereas employee engagement may also include the relationship with the organization. As we will see in the section on “Engagement in business”, by including the relationship with the organization the distinction between engagement and traditional concepts such as organizational commitment and extra-role behavior gets blurred. The current popularity of engagement is illustrated by Table 2.1. An internet search yielded almost 650,000 hits though narrowing the search down to only scholarly publications – many of them from the gray area (e.g., white papers, fact sheets, and consultancy reports) – reduced the number of hits to less than 2000. These impressive numbers stand in sharp contrast to the dearth of publications on engagement that are included in PsycINFO, the leading database of academic publications in psychology. The most comprehensive PsycINFO search revealed one hundred publications with either “employee engagement” or “work engagement” in the title or in the abstract