Employee Engagement: A Research Study with Special Reference to Rane Engine Valve Ltd. (Plant - I), Chennai, India

PreambleEngagement at work was conceptualized by Kahn, (1990) as the "harnessing of organizational members' selves to their work roles. In engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.The second related construct to engagement in organizational behavio r is the notion o f flow advanced by Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990). Csikzentmihalyi (1975) defines flow as the "holistic sensation' that, people feel when they act with total involvement. Flow is the state in which there is little distinction between the self and enviro nment. When individuals are in Flow State little conscious control is necessary for their actions.Employee engagement is the thus the level of commitment and invo lvement an employee has towards their orga nization and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organization. The organization must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relatio nship between employer and employee. ' Thus Emp loyee engagement is a barometer that determines the association of a person with the organization Engagement is most closely associated with the existing construction of job involvement (Brown 1996) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Job invo lvement is defined as "the degree to which the job situation is central to the person and his or her identity (Lawler & Hall, 1970). Kanungo (1982) maintained that job involvement is a "Cognitive or belief state of Psychological identification. Job involvement is thought to depend on both need saliency and the potential o f a job to satisfy these needs. Thus job involvement results form a cognitive judgment about the needs satisfying abilities of the job. Jobs in this view are tied to o ne's self image. Engagement d iffers from job in as it is concerned mo re with how the individual emp loyees his/her self d uring the performance of his / her job. Furthermore engagement entails the active use of emotions. F inally engagement may be thought of as an antecedent to job invo lvement in those individuals who experience deep engagement in their roles should come to identify with their jobs. When Kahn talked about employee engagement he has given important to all three aspects physically, cognitively and emotionally. Whereas in job satisfaction importance has been more given to co gnitive side,HR practitioners believe that the engagement challenge has a lot to do with how employee feels about the about work experience and how he or she is treated in the organization. It has a lot to do with emotions which are fundamentally related to d rive bottom line success in a company. There will always be people who never give their best efforts no matter how hard HR and line managers try to engage them. "But for the most part employees want to commit to companies because doing so satisfies a powerful and a basic need in connect with and contrib ute to something significant". Categories of Employee EngagementAccording to the Gallup the Co nsulting organization there are there are different typ es of people:-Engaged-"Engaged " employees are builders. They want to know the desired expectations for their role so they can meet and exceed them. They're naturally curious abo ut their company and their place in it. They perform at consistently high levels. They want to use their talents and strengths at wo rk every day. They wo rk with passion and they drive innovation and move their organization forwardNot Engaged-Not-engaged employees tend to concentrate on tasks rather than the goals and outcomes they are expected to accomplish. They want to be told what to do just so they can do it and say they have finished. They focus o n accomp lishing tasks vs. achieving an outcome. Employees who are not-engaged tend to feel their contributions are being overlooked, and their potential is not being tapped. …