Employee engagement, Organisational Performance and Individual Wellbeing: Exploring the Evidence, Developing the Theory

Funding Agency: ESRC

Date: 2011 – 2012

Project team:

  • Professor Katie Truss, Kent Business School
  • Dr Emma Soane, LSE
  • Professor Rick Delbridge, Cardiff University
  • Dr Kerstin Alfes, Kingston University
  • Dr Amanda Shantz, Kingston University
  • Dr Georgy Petrov, Kingston University

Employee engagement has become a topic of unprecedented interest to HR practitioners and line managers. In the wake of the Government’s highly influential 2009 MacLeod Review, engagement has been hailed as one of the CIPD’s new core competencies for HR professionals, and numerous consultancy firms offer engagement surveys and engagement-oriented interventions. An entire industry has sprung up offering guidance, advice and training on how to raise levels of engagement. However, academic research has lagged behind practitioner interest, and many unanswered questions remain about the status of employee engagement as a construct, how the purported link between engagement and performance works, and whether engagement can be managed.

We were awarded funding by the ESRC to run a seminar series on the topic of employee engagement which will provide a long-awaited opportunity to bring together a group of international academics and experts in the field to debate and discuss the status of employee engagement today. The series of four events started at Kent University’s Medway campus on 8th February 2011.

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