Job engagement and Employee performance: Toward Organisational Growth and Employee Motivation-1

Studies have shown in recent years that there are more disengaged and actively disengaged employees in today's organizations in many countries than engaged employees. Job engagement simply means “passion for work". To crown it all, it is even much harder to build engagement within the specific group of employees in a situation when the knowledge about the specifics of their work-life is relatively missing. Thus, to CEO's, job engagement is one of the top five most important challenges for management.

An individual's expressed intention to leave their organization is generally regarded as an important measure of how they are feeling about their work. Engaged employees are likely to have greater attachment to their organization and a lower tendency to quit.
From research findings, according to (Buckingham 2001) identified three discrete groups of employees, engaged employee, non-engaged employees and actively disengaged employees. The findings indicated that the majority (63%) of employees fell into the non-engaged employee’s category. These employees were characterized as being productive in the sense of doing what are asked of them but were not instrumentally motivated; they could be tempted by job vacancy elsewhere and were responsive to financial incentives, but cynical about higher-order appears to loyalty.

Of the sample, 17% fell into the engaged employees category; these employees were characterized as being loyalty committed, productive and task-effective. Actively disengaged formed the remaining 20% of the sample and comprised employees who were physically present, but psychologically absent. These employees demonstrated behavioural attitudes that were negative, unco-operative and even hostile.  Thus, how do we  make sure  the employees are satisfied ? so that there can be full optimization of their skills thereby having a trickle down effect on their performance.