ISE EBook for Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience by HUGHES;

Author:HUGHES;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781264363780
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK) Limited (ISE)
Published: 2020-12-22T20:00:00+00:00

page 355

CHAPTER 10

Follower Satisfaction and Engagement

Introduction

Is it a leader’s job to make followers happy? Are happy and satisfied followers better performers than those who are dissatisfied with their jobs? If leaders improve followers’ attitudes toward work, should they see a commensurate increase in followers’ performance? As described in Chapter 9, job satisfaction does not have a particularly strong relationship with job performance. Happy followers may be content with the situation and express little urgency to get anything done whereas dissatisfied workers sometimes produce superior results. Because the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance has been so tenuous, researchers started asking whether other follower attitudes might be better predictors of employee work behavior. Over the past 20 years, researchers have determined that employee engagement, a concept highly related to but different from job satisfaction and motivation, has stronger relationships with followers’ performance levels and team or organizational effectiveness measures. Organizations seized upon these findings and routinely assess and implement approaches to improve employee engagement. Employee engagement has become a key metric for Human Resources and has grown to be a big business, with organizations spending over $700 million annually to improve engagement scores. Millions of employees around the globe are surveyed each year, and these results have yielded some interesting findings (see Figure 10.1).1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Whereas employee satisfaction surveys typically ask followers about their attitudes toward a broad variety of factors, such as working conditions, stress levels, pay and benefits, job security, promotion opportunities, diversity, or top leadership, employee engagement is more focused on followers’ attitudes toward the tasks and work activities they need to perform. Some people truly believe what they do is important and enjoy their work, whether they are designing marketing campaigns, operating power plants, writing computer code, or helping people obtain student loans. Others choose to work for the pay and benefits and find their jobs to be neither impactful nor enjoyable. Researchers have found that organizations with higher percentages of fully engaged employees tend to report better results than those with lower percentages of these followers, and employee engagement has now become the “holy grail” of employee attitudinal research.6, 7, 8, 9 Some consultants and organizations have come to believe that employee engagement is an end unto itself—getting followers to feel the work they do is interesting and important is the right thing to do. Although these altruistic notions are laudable, most organizations believe employee engagement is more a means to an end. Organizations exist to achieve results and are concerned primarily with effectiveness measures, such as market share, overall customer satisfaction levels, annual revenues, or followers’ productivity levels. Top leaders see having highly engaged employees as a pathway to achieve superior results. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Too many highly trained, committed professionals return again and again to the methodology that employee engagement programs are what “WE might do to make THEM feel invested in US.” They are an HR brand-loyalty marketing program, really.

Mark Kille, human resources consultant

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