Disengaging from engagement

• Author: John Purcell
• Published date: 01 July 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12046
• Date: 01 July 2014

PROVOCATION SERIES PAPER

Disengaging from engagement

John Purcell, University of Bath

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 24, no 3, 2014, pages 241–254

Two basic approaches to engagement are contrasted. Work engagement relates to an individual’s

psychological state of mind while at work. The problems with this and its limited relevance to HRM are

considered: its concern with a minority of employees, the way non-engaged staff are portrayed, the

airbrushing out of conflict and the pernicious use of positive psychology. Employee or behavioural

engagement is more relevant to HRM and employment relations but suffers from a lack of definition and

a failure to specify the components that are associated with higher levels of employee engagement. It is

usually a-contextual and lacks the subtlety of earlier work on HR and performance, while covering the same

ground. Problems remain with research seeking to show the connections with financial performance.

Boiling engagement measures down to one score is particularly worrying. The management of employee

engagement in the UK National Health Service illustrates that properly constructed studies of employee

engagement can inform policies and practices to improve work relations, employee well-being and aspects

of performance.

Contact: John Purcell, School of Management, University of Bath, Bath BA4 7AL, UK. Email:

purjohn@gmail.com

Keywords: work engagement; positive psychology; employee engagement; social exchange;

performance; surveys

INTRODUCTION

The engagement ‘industry’ (Welbourne, 2011), better described by Macey and Schneider

(2008) as a ‘folk theory’, rolls on and gathers pace after the promising start made by

Kahn (1990). By now, most of the large consulting companies have sought to corner the

profitable market of devising and selling their own engagement surveys with dubious

constructs and measures (Briner, 2014), purporting to show links to performance with implied

causality. The Engage for Success movement launched by the UK prime minister in 2011 claims

to have employers on board, with a combined total of two million employees (2014) with task

groups, a guru group of experts, and what they hoped was the definitive proof that better

engagement was certainly associated, if not causally so, with better organisational performance

(Rayton et al., 2012). Engagement is the hot topic in the HR profession, and increasing numbers

of academics are researching and writing in the area. A recent, and as yet unpublished, study

by Catherine Truss and colleagues, carefully synthesising the evidence for employee

engagement, unearthed 3,058 items published in academic journals, 1,136 articles in magazines,

633 articles in trade magazines, 172 dissertations and 116 books published in English since 1990.

If it is yet another management fad, as Guest (2014) in a carefully crafted essay suggests, it is

a deeply entrenched one.

The problem is not just one of defining what engagement is but the way it is being used,

with implications for the study and practice of employment relations and HRM. There are two

basic approaches that bear very little relationship to each other. ‘Work engagement’ relates

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12046

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 24 NO 3, 2014 241

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Purcell, J. (2014) ‘Disengaging from engagement’. Human Resource Management Journal 24: 3, 241–254.