Page 85 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

56 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

background in research methods and statistics to properly vet
such instruments and naïvely assume that they are valid. Thus,
resources are spent on invalid assessments, and frequently
even greater resources are spent on follow-up interventions to
increase the scores of an erroneous assessment. Unfortunately,
there is no oversight committee or regulatory body that watches
over consulting firms and requires them to demonstrate the
validity of their instruments or services—buyer beware!

Defining Employee Engagement

It is difficult to overemphasize the critical importance of how one
defines and measures a psychological construct. All research find-
ings, conclusions, and subsequent interventions are based on the
premise that you have accurately measured what you intended to
measure. Psychological constructs, such as employee satisfaction,
motivation, and engagement, are challenging to measure because
they are composed of subjective feelings, thoughts, and beliefs
that cannot be measured directly. There is no absolute scale or
agreed-on instrument or test. The task is further complicated by
the conceptual overlap among similar constructs. For example,
employees who are engaged may also appear motivated and vice
versa. Distinguishing similar constructs is critically important to
advance our understanding of each as an individual factor, how
they relate to one another, and how each can be affected.

Conceptual Definition of
“Employee Engagement”
The first step in assessing a psychological construct is to cre-
ate a conceptual definition that serves as the foundation on
which the measurement instrument will be built. A conceptual