What is necessary for high employee engagement and satisfaction? A look at the best places to work in the Federal Government Index

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• Author: Gordon Abner,Arfa Alam,Heejin Cho
• Date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13576

VIEWPOINT ARTICLE

What is necessary for high employee engagement and

satisfaction? A look at the best places to work in the Federal

Government Index

Gordon Abner

1

|Arfa Alam

2

|Heejin Cho

2

1

LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas

at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA

2

Partnership for Public Service, Washington,

DC, USA

Correspondence

Gordon Abner, University of Texas at Austin,

LBJ School of Public Affairs, Austin, TX, USA.

Email: gordon.abner@austin.utexas.edu

Abstract

Governments around the world, including the US federal government, are seeking

ways to improve employee engagement, given that it has a positive impact on job

performance and organizational performance. Unfortunately, scholars and practi-

tioners have struggled to provide specific and actionable insights for fostering

high employee engagement. We describe how data from the Best Places to Work

in the Federal Government Index combined with Necessary Condition Analysis can

be used to provide government leaders with practical advice for fostering high

engagement and satisfaction in their agencies.

Evidence for Practice

•The Best Places to Work in the Federal Government Index (BPWI) provides a

practical and useful measure of employee engagement and satisfaction.

•Combining data from the BPWI with Necessary Condition Analysis can provide

government leaders with practical advice for fostering high engagement and

satisfaction in their agencies.

•Practical advice for fostering high engagement and satisfaction should be

agency or subcomponent specific and make use of recent data.

INTRODUCTION

Research on employee engagement began in the 1990s

and has since become one of the most researched topics

among management scholars (Kahn, 1990; Shuck, 2011).

While scholars differ in how they define employee

engagement, at a minimum the term refers to a “positive,

fulfilling, work-related state of mind”(Schaufeli

et al., 2002, 74). A growing body of research has found

that employee engagement has a positive impact on job

performance (Akingbola & Van Den Berg, 2019; Borst

et al., 2020) and organizational performance (Harter

et al., 2002; Mackay et al., 2017).

Given the findings in the scholarly literature, the US

Office of Personnel Management (OPM), “the Canadian

Public Service, the Australian Public Service, and the

U.K. Civil Service, among other [governments]”have

started “initiatives aimed at creating organizational condi-

tions that generate high levels of employee engagement”

(Hameduddin & Fernandez, 2019, 356). In fact, in 2010,

OPM developed the Employee Engagement Index (EEI),

which is made up of fifteen questions from the annual US

Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) (US Office of

Personnel Management, 2016). The EEI aims to measure

the conditions that lead to engagement and not actual

engagement. OPM’s“choice to measure the antecedents

of psychological engagement instead of psychological

engagement may be due to limitations of the survey

instrument used, difficulties involved in adapting it for dif-

ferent research purposes, or path dependence since most

of the items on the FEVS were borrowed from earlier fed-

eral employee surveys undertaken in the 1980s and sub-

sequently codified into federal regulations”

(Hameduddin & Fernandez, 2019, 357).

The absence of items in the FEVS that measure

employee engagement is indicative of a larger problem

in the literature, namely that it lacks measures of

employee engagement that are useful (Getha-

Taylor, 2018; Shuck, 2011). Shuck (2011) notes this, stat-

ing, “the challenge for researchers at this time is to

develop measures that are not only psychometrically

solid, but also practical and useful”(318). The need to

Received: 22 May 2022Revised: 20 October 2022Accepted: 25 October 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13576

974 © 2022 American Society for Public Administration.Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:974–981.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar