Employee Engagement Concepts, Constructs and Strategies: A Systematic Review of Literature

Employee engagement is an emerging phenomenon in the human resources field. Organizations are seeking ways to enhance employee performance and increase productivity through the development of human capital, thus organizations focus on ways to engage employees in the organizations’ goals, objectives, and values, moreover ways to engage the employees in their job and tasks. This study used a systematic literature review approach, to explore employee engagement in the workplace from the literature, illustrating the drivers and factors that impact the fluctuating differences in engagement between employees. Moreover, human resources practices are playing a significant role in the formulation of engagement strategy in the organization, therefore the study is to provide aspects that the top level should be aware of to merge the engagement strategy in the human resources policies. Also, this study is to focus on the theoretical models in the literature about employee engagement which are the base for further studies in the same field. It is found that there is no consensus on the concept of employee engagement, as different theoretical frameworks exhibit different constructs for employee engagement, which leads to different strategies of implementation. It has been remarkably noted that employees are either engaged or disengaged based on different drivers which are from inner psychological traits, behavior, or emotions, on the other hand, the outside drivers are from the environment, cultural changes, and leadership. Whilst the tasks and duties and level of responsibilities can be the major engine of employee engagement level.