Engagement is the measure of the Team's Emotional Commitment to their leader and it is critically important for the bottom line. From Create a Culture of Engagement in 2013, Video 05 is a creative presentation by Ken Wright - the founder of The Wright Coach and Engage4Results Pty Ltd describes employee engagement with leadership which covers many strategies a leader can implement immediately - they cost virtually nothing and are guaranteed to make people feel great about themselves - which is the real secret to getting the best out of people and engaging them.
Video
5.0 : Leadership, Engage your team
(Source:
Leadership - Engage your Team – Ken Wright, Create a Culture of Engagement,
2013)
According to Hewitt’s, (2014) employee
engagement suggests that leaders hold the key to employee engagement.
Leadership means inspiring people to do their best to achieve the desired
results. It involves developing and communicating a vision for the future,
inspiring people, and ensuring participation (Dixon ,1994). Ex: Tim Cook is the CEO of the Apple. He took
over Apple after the company’s founder, Steve Jobs. Cook has helped navigate
Apple through the transition after Jobs’ death as well as developing new
product lines and opening Apple retail stores in China (cmoe.com, 2020).
The organizations have been interested
in the willingness of employees to dedicate themselves for leadership roles in
the organization and how employees think and feel attached to their work (Ariani,
2014). It is understood that the organization wants to increase
employee engagement, given that the engaged employees were willing to devote
themselves fully in their work by way of a positive role (Kahn, 1990) and
remain in them longer work (Saks, 2006; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Employee
engagement concerns the extent to which individuals use all the resources of
cognitive, emotional, and physical to perform roles associated with the job
(Kahn, 1990; Xu & Thomas, 2011). Employees who feel committed and willing
to engage in their work generally is the employee who has the characteristics
of an energetic, fun, enjoyable, and effective in carrying out their work
(Kahn, 1990; Macey & Schneider, 2008; Xu & Thomas, 2011). The high
level of employee engagement is associated with increased return on assets,
earnings of each employee higher, better performance, greater sales growth,
lower absenteeism, reduced employee turnover, lower cost than the cost of
goods, and error because the products are not diminishing quality (Salanova,
Agut, and Piero, 2005; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004; Xu & Thomas, 2011).
Employee engagement is a concept that
contains the value of the understanding and improvement of individual and
organizational performance and can be influenced by the leader. In theory, the
impact of leadership on employee engagement is a leadership style that is
adopted to improve employee engagement at work. A leadership style can also
improve employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and employee enthusiasm for
work (Alok & Israel, 2012). Kahn (1990) suggested that an individual
involved is a person who is close to the work-related tasks, so that the
employee is willing to give you the ability and energy, and eager to work in an
organization that should translate into a higher level of performance in
accordance with the role played (in-role performance) and performance that are
outside the role played (extra-role performance). When people dedicate themselves
to the job role, the individual must have a higher contextual performance and
related to the tendency of individuals to behave in a manner that facilitates
the tendency to behave in accordance with social and psychological context of
an organization (Christian, Garza, & Slaughter, 2011).
Leadership
skills ( Dixon, 1994)
● Inspire others.
● Persuade others willingly to behave
differently;
● Clarify what needs to be done and why;
● Communicate a sense of purpose to the
team;
● According to (Tamkin et al, 2010),
that leaders cannot create performance themselves but are conduits for performance through their
influence on others;
● Get the team into action so that the
task is achieved.
Employee engagement and leadership
supervision or support is very important for all organizations that promote
organizational citizenship behaviour. According to Ariani, (2014) there are
three reasons why this is an important concern.
First, Leadership influences
followers, motivates them to participate in activities outside the business and
curriculum, and enhances their ability to carry out these activities beyond
expectations. This theoretical proposition has been empirically supported
by Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, and Bacharach, 2000) and Podsakoff and Bommer
(1996).
Second, leaders can influence
followers by creating meaningful work (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993).
Third, employee perceptions of their
work called employee engagement positively able to predict their organizational
citizenship behaviour (Purvanova, Bono, & Dzieweczynski, 2006)
Video 06: 11 Things leaders say to drive
Employee engagement
Source: Blessingwhite, A Division of GP strategies
Found a positive relationship between
supervisor support and employee engagement. Theorist suggested that Social
Exchange Theory may be able to provide insight on how leaders influence the
results achieved by the organization. Social Exchange Theory suggests that
employees will reciprocate the leader's behaviour towards them with their own behaviour
and the presence of a suitable reciprocal relationship as part of a social
exchange relationship development process (Soeib, Othman, & D ' Silva,
2013). Leader behaviour is a source of motivation and satisfaction for his men.
Leadership also influences the attitude and performance of followers (Bycio,
Hackett, & Allen, 1995). Leadership is an important element in the
development of employee engagement.
Basic
leadership styles :
According to Goleman, (2000) six styles
of leadership: coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting
and coaching (Table 1 collates a brief explanation of each style). This type is
derived from research in the commercial field. Each style is based on some
combination of emotional intelligence abilities. Although still controversial,
to what extent EI affects effective leadership (Waterhouse, 2006) There is no
doubt that there is a connection between emotional intelligence and effective leadership,
at least in its changing style (Barling et al, 2000).
Table 1:
Goleman’s theory of leadership
Source : Based on Daniel Goleman (2002)
List of References:
Alok, Kumar and Israel, D. (2012).
Authentic Leadership and Work Engagement. The Indian Journal of Individual
Relations, 47(3): 498-510.
Aon Hewitt. (2014). Trends in global
employee engagement. Retrieved 15 July 2015, from
2014-trends-in-globalemployee-engagement-report
Ariani, D. W. (2014) ‘Relationship Leadership, Employee
Engagement, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior’, International Journal
of Business and Social Research, 4(8), pp. 74–90. doi:
10.18533/ijbsr.v4i8.589.
Avey, James B.; Hughes, Larry W.;
Norman, Steven M.; and Luthans, Kyle W. (2008). Using Positivity,
Transformational Leadership, and Empowerment To Combat Employee Negativity.
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Barling J., Salter F., Kelloway E. K.
(2000), Transformational leadership and EI: an exploratory study, “Leadership
& Organizational Development Journal
Christian, Michael S.; Garza, Adela S.;
and Slaughter, Jerel E. (2011). Work Engagement: A Quantitative Review and Test
of Its Relations with Task and Contextual Performance. Personnel Psychology,
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Dixon, N F (1994) On the Psychology of
Military Incompetence, London, Pimlico
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results, “Harvard Business Review
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Management Journal, 33(4): 692-724.
Leadership - Engage your Team - Create a
Culture of Engagement. (2013). [video] Directed by K. Wright. USA.
Purvanova, Radostina K.; Bono, Joyce E.;
and Dzieweczynski, Jessica. (2006). Transformational Leadership, Job
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19(1): 1-22.
Schaufeli, Wilmar B. and Bakker, Arnold
B. (2004). Job Demands, Job Resources, and Their Relationship with Burnout and
Engagement: A Multi Sample Study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(3):
293-315.
Shamir, Boas; House, Robert J.; and
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Tamkin, P, Pearson, G, Hirsh, W and
Constable, S (2010) Exceeding Expectation: The principles of outstanding
leadership, London, The Work Foundation.
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