Catch ’em before they have decided to leave: Employee engagement-a positive psychology approach

Pages:67-74
Malavika Desai (Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management Shillong, Meghalaya, India)
Bishakha Majumdar (Department of Applied Psychology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata West Bengal, India)
Ganapathy P.Prabhu (Staffing Lead-EMEA Europe, Middle East, Africa)

Employee engagement is the level of commitment and involvement an employee has towards his organization and its values. An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and is enthusiastic about, his or her work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests and fulfils its goals. Employee engagement has direct impact on the employee’s productivity. Understandably, the most productive employees are those that are not only committed and loyal; but also but also those whose outputs are healthy and gratifying both for themselves as well as for the organization they work for. Obviously, these are the employees who can be called ‘engaged”. In almost a bottom-up fashion, the organization as a whole benefits from employees that are committed, loyal, productive, and engaged. The paper aims at finding the employee engagement across manufacturing organizations and IT oranizations, and compares the underlying reasons indicating high or low employee engagement. Fifty middle level executives of a car manufacturing unit and fifty such employees of an IT firm, located in and around the city of Bengaluru, India, were sampled for the study. It was found that the degree of employee engagement was significantly high in the manufacturing organization as compared to that in IT firm. The main causes for a higher engagement in the manufacturing sector were found to be as the impression that the firm cares for and values the employees, free and frank communication with immediate supervisor, empathetic attitude of the latter towards the former, recognition of one’s contributions towards the organizational goals, and freedom to participate in the decision making process .