Page 90 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Employee Engagement

While identifying the underlying causes of employee engagement
and disengagement are important, they are not appropriate to
include in an instrument that claims to measure engagement.

To summarize, symptoms provide evidence of the phenome-
non, while causes give you possible explanations of why the phe-
nomenon occurred in the first place. The more that an employee
engagement measure contains items relevant to related con-
structs such as employee satisfaction and motivation, and the
more items there are that assess causes instead of symptoms of
engagement, the less valid the measure. The less valid the mea-
sure, the less credible any findings or results that come from
research using the instrument.
Although all psychological instruments should be evaluated
across several forms of validity (e.g., construct, statistical, inter-
nal, external) and reliability (e.g., test-retest, parallel forms,
internal consistency), this “symptom versus cause” distinction
should enable you to readily distinguish the wheat from the
chaff. I have spent several years creating an instrument that I
believe identifies the symptoms of engagement. Interested read-
ers are invited to contact me directly (drpaul@therespectmodel
.com) to receive a free copy of my employee engagement survey
and scoring instructions.
Despite the widespread conceptual confusion and measure-
ment problem, the construct of employee engagement remains
valid. However, the field is in desperate need of individuals and
organizations less concerned with marketing and selling engage-
ment tools or programs and more concerned with developing
measures and interventions based on sound empirical research.