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Kahn's 3
Dimensions of Engage
Employee every
employee
Engagement: Still with your
Good to Go in own
branded
2021? Internal
Stuart Sinclair - November 2, 2020 Comms App
Employee engagement is a topic that many Find out
business leaders talk about. Organisations want more

to get employee engagement right in order to

improve motivation, enthusiasm and buy in to
their overall aims, objectives and strategy. The
general consensus, gained from research
undertaken since the 1990s, is that an effective
employee engagement programme will increase
work performance and the company's bottom
line. This work has built over time to form today's
employment engagement ideas and insights.

One of the first researchers to identify the

concept of employee engagement was William
Kahn, a psychologist who was interested in
understanding the factors involved in people
engagement.
FEATURED
RESOURCES
 The big book
of employee
What are Kahn's three engagement
ideas
dimensions of employee
engagement? If you are looking to
improve employee
Kahn produced his paper, Psychological engagement, this guide is
a great place to start.
Conditions of Personal Engagement and Packed with 44 pages of
Disengagement (Academy of Management ideas, insights and
Journal, December 1990, Vol. 3, no. 4, pp 692-724), inspiration to help you
engage your workforce.
following his research to test the premise that
individuals not only can bring varying levels of Download your
themselves physically, cognitively and copy
emotionally to their work, but that those levels
affected their experiences of work and therefore
their performance.

Within his work, Kahn identified three principle

dimensions of employee engagement - physical,
cognitive and emotional. These are defined as
follows:

Physical engagement - This relates to the extent to

How to
which employees expend their efforts, both
physical and mental, as they go about their jobs.
choose the
Kahn used examples of employees describing
right
themselves as 'flying around' during their work,
employee
engagement
and experiencing high levels of personal engagement
engagement during that time. He linked the solution
ability to expend physical and mental energy at
Navigating the world of
work with increased feelings of confidence.
employee engagement
solutions can be
Cognitive engagement - To be engaged at this level, overwhelming. Download
employees need to know what their employer's our guide to help you
choose the best option for
vision and strategies are, and what performance
you, your employees and
they need to deliver to contribute to them as your business.
much as possible. Kahn also drew attention to
the meaning that people attached to their work, Download your
guide
theorising that more knowledge encouraged
more creativity and confident decision making.

Emotional engagement - This is based upon the

emotional relationship that employees feel with
their employer. A positive relationship will
require the organisation to learn how to create a
sense of belonging at work, encouraging
employees to trust and buy in to the values and
mission of the company. Kahn cited the likes of
positive interpersonal relations, group dynamics
and management styles as practices that would
make people feel safe and trusted.

What Khan did within his work was relate three

psychological conditions (feeling safe,
meaningfulness and having the right energy and
resources) to the three dimensions of
engagement (physical, cognitive and emotional).
In essence, he believed that engaging people
across all three dimensions would help them to
feel secure in their roles, feel that what the
efforts they were making were worth it and
believe that they would be supported in their
physical and mental efforts.

Has time been kind to

Kahn's 3 dimensions of
engagement?
Before Kahn introduced the concept of personal
engagement, managers tended to think that
good performance followed from getting the
'right fit' during recruitment exercises and
providing the right incentives. In raising the topic
of engagement at work through his research,
Kahn set in motion a whole field of discussions
and theories about employee engagement.

So are Kahn's three dimensions of engagement

still relevant, thirty years on? They are certainly
still being discussed by professionals and
researchers in the field. A Southampton team
produced a report in 2015 on staff engagement
in the NHS and cited Kahn as the first academic
to bring employee engagement to the fore.

A lot of research, however, provides a lot of

dimensions and definitions. The aforementioned
report mentions the following:
 Work/job engagement, which focuses on
engagement with tasks
Multidimensional engagement, separating
engagement with a person's job from their
engagement with their employer (which can
be different)
Engagement being dependent upon an
individual's attitudes - broadly, a positive
attitude will result in employee engagement
Self-engagement - how a person relates to
high levels of performance.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel &

Development (CIPD) also refers to Kahn's work
but notes that there is no one definition of
employee engagement, which has led to
different consultants and researchers
recommending a variety of ways to achieve
employee engagement. It seems that
organisations need to use employee
engagement survey results to influence their
thinking on which dimensions of employee
engagement will work for them.

Is Kahn's work still

relevant in 2021?
Research conducted in 2004 by May et al
supported Kahn's assertions on the relationship
between engagement and his psychological
conditions of safety, meaningfulness and
/ il bilit S h
energy/resources availability. Some researchers
have focused more on the work people do, while
others have followed in Kahn's footsteps and
looked at broader models of employee
engagement.

Kahn's work has widened human resources

practice beyond simple motivation techniques to
more holistic approaches to employee
engagement. For example, the CIPD
recommends creating a strategy that covers
organisational commitment, the enjoyment
gained from work, the quality of working
relationships and job satisfaction. Those first
three factors can be linked back to Kahn's
dimensions of employee engagement.

Engage For Success, a voluntary organisation

sponsored by the CIPD, refers in its work to 'the
Macleod Review' (Macleod & Clarke, Department
for Business Innovation and Skills, 2009:
Engaging for success: enhancing performance
through employee engagement). That review
suggested that there were four 'enablers of
engagement': strategic narrative, engaging
managers, employee voice (which would involve
an employee listening strategy) and
organisational integrity. Again, it's easy to see the
connections to Kahn's three dimensions of
engagement.

Kahn's influence can be seen in today's

organisational practices such as implementing
wellbeing strategies (physical engagement),
workshops to include staff in the values and
strategies of the organisation (cognitive
engagement) and developing management
programmes that use coaching and active
listening (emotional engagement).

Employee engagement:
theory versus practice
While Engage For Success reports that high
engagement levels have positive implications for
productivity, sickness absence, staff retention,
innovation and customer service levels, it also
states that the UK has an employee engagement
deficit.

Has the work of Kahn (and others after him)

therefore been limited by real practice? The
answer is yes and no. Engage For Success's
Nailing The Evidence 2012 report points to lower
engagement measures in UK organisations but
also highlights positive results achieved by
companies abroad that demonstrate higher
employee engagement levels. It seems that
there is something about employee
engagement that many UK organisations just
aren't getting.
Results from elsewhere in the world suggest that
research in, and practice of, employee
engagement provides the benefits that Kahn
and others discussed. The bottom line is that
employee engagement influences employee
performance. Their work emphasises honest
communication, an understanding of the impact
of leadership on employee engagement,
empowered decision making and initiatives to
encourage employees to buy in to their
employers' mission and strategic objectives.

There is a suggestion that UK companies have

focused on other priorities, certainly during
difficult financial times, ahead of employee
engagement. While employee engagement
programmes can be long term investments,
technology such as an employment
engagement platform and employee
engagement apps can lessen the burden. The
research indicates that organisations can't afford
to ignore employee engagement if they want
the best productivity and performance results.

Topics: Employee Engagement

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