Page 86 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Employee Engagement

definition describes in general terms the phenomenon under
investigation using well-known and accepted descriptors. For
example, we might define self-esteem as the extent to which a
person holds positive feelings toward himself or herself. Think
about the conceptual definition as the one that you might find in
the dictionary. As mentioned earlier, more than fifty definitions
have been identified for employee engagement. Fortunately, the
Conference Board convened a committee of experts to address
this very issue and created the following composite definition:
“Employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intel-
lectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, orga-
nization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/
her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”
Critically, this definition distinguishes among the four different
areas—job, organization, manager, and co-workers—in which an
employee may feel engaged, whereas many other definitions of
engagement ignore this distinction. For those in sales or service
organizations, I recommend including “client” as a fifth category
to which employees may feel connected.
While the conceptual definition helps us to understand and
speak about a phenomenon, it is the operational definition that
helps us to measure the construct.

Operational Definition of
“Employee Engagement”
There is no more basic or important methodological issue in all
of science than how we measure the variables, terms, objects,
and constructs that we study. W. Edwards Deming, considered
the father of Total Quality Management and the driving force
behind the success of Japanese manufacturing, wrote: “An oper-
ational definition is a procedure agreed upon for translation of
concept into measurement.” The operational definition allows