"Employee Engagement - a Social Exchange Perspective on the role of the manager"

Employee engagement has become a subject of interest to companies, HR practitioners and as well as the academic community. Employees with a high level of engagement have been shown to perform better and show higher... [ view full abstract ]

Employee engagement has become a subject of interest to companies, HR practitioners and as well as the academic community. Employees with a high level of engagement have been shown to perform better and show higher organisational behaviour. (Bakker & Bal, 2010; Saks, 2006; Rich et al, 2010). Engagement appears to be positively related to job attitudes such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment and negatively related to turnover intention (Saks, 2006). Engagement has been found to be positively linked to business-unit outcomes such as productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability, turnover and safety (Harter et al. 2002). Based on the evidence of these studies, it makes financial sense for companies to support employee engagement and business sense for HR practitioners wishing to support their organisational goals to understand which practices and behaviours are most likely to support employee engagement.

To date the literature has advocated HR policies for improving engagement in organisations but has not explored in any detail the role of the Front-Line Manager (FLM). Furthermore, the impact of how HR is delivered and the strength of the relationship between Front-Line Managers and the HR function has not been explored in detail.  This paper seeks to address these limitations by proposing a conceptual model which draws upon social exchange theory and builds on Kahn’s (1990) ethnographic study which looked at the conditions necessary for engagement.

The academic literature looking at the antecedents to engagement includes many elements which can be influenced by front- line managers (FLMs) such as autonomy, reward, supervisor support and feedback. (Bakker and Demerouti,, 2007; Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004) However, it has been suggested that “there remains a gap in understanding regarding which leadership behaviours could affect engagement as well as the processes around which leader behaviours bring about higher levels of engagement” (Shuck and Herd, 2012, p.159). 

Kahn’s (1990) concept of the three psychological conditions necessary for engagement- meaningfulness, safety and availability- provides a useful lens to consider the front-line manager behaviours which may be impacting the conditions necessary for engagement. For Kahn, personal engagement is “the harnessing of organisation members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performance”. Kahn suggested that a person’s degree of engagement was a function of psychological meaningfulness, psychological safety and psychological availability. Psychological meaningfulness involves the extent to which people derive meaning from their work and feel that they are receiving a return on investments of self in the performance of their role. Psychological safety refers to an individual being able to employ and express one’s true self without fear of negative consequences to one’s self image, status or career. Psychological availability refers to the belief that one has the physical, emotional and psychological resources required to invest one’s self in the performance of a role. May et al. (2004), in a study to empirically test Kahn’s 1990 model, found that meaningfulness, safety, and availability were significantly related to engagement levels. Front Line managers may  influence the engagement of their team members in different ways by e.g. helping employees see how their work connects to a broader purpose, communicating how roles in the team link to organisational values and goals as well as allowing employees input to decision making. The line manager can ensure that the employee voice is heard and allow employees to feel confident and secure in the role they occupy which is likely to support psychological safety and availability.

Proposition 1: Front-Line Manager behaviours influence engagement of their team members by influencing the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety and availability necessary for engagement.

Whilst the different models which have looked at the antecedents to engagement have highlighted the importance of leadership, “the current engagement models do not fully explain why individuals will respond to these conditions with varying degrees of engagement” (Saks, 2006, p.603). Saks argues that a theoretical rationale for explaining employee engagement can be found in Social Exchange Theory (SET).  According to Social Exchange Theory (SET), employees gauge their contribution to the organisation based on what they perceive the organisation to be providing them. Saks’ (2006) study found evidence that POS is positively related to job engagement and that both job characteristics and organisational support were significant predictors of job engagement. We can therefore hypothesise that employees who have higher POS might become more engaged to their role as part of the reciprocity norm of SET in order to help the organisation reach its objectives. (Rhoades et al, 2001)

Proposition 2: Employees with higher levels of POS display higher role engagement

When considering Perceived Organisational Support (POS), it is useful also to consider how the employee views the organisation’s actions and which members of the organisation have most impact on the level of perceived organisational support. Supervisors and others in leadership roles play a key role in providing organisational rewards and resources to employees, and we could expect that supportive behaviour from supervisors would be more closely related to POS than supportive behaviour from co-workers and teammates, who would be seen to be less representative of the organisation. The greater the extent to which an employee believes the actions of an organisational agent to be representative of the actions of the organisation itself, the stronger the influence an organisational agent will have on that employee’s POS (Eisenberger et al, 2002; Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007; Zagenczyk et al, 2009). (Coyle-Shapiro and Shore 2007, Zagenczyk et al. 2009)The line manager, as the key organisational agent working with the employee, may be having an impact on levels of perceived organisational support and in turn engagement.

Research has shown a link between HR practices and POS. Supportive Human Resource (HR) practices such as participation in decision making, fairness of rewards, and growth opportunities have all been found to contribute to POS (Allen et al. 2003). Alfes et al., (2013,p6) suggest that “HRM practices are viewed by employees as a ‘personalised’ commitment to them by the organisation which is then reciprocated back to the organisation by employees through positive attitudes and behaviour.”. Saks (2006) considers that a gap in understanding of the variables impacting levels of POS and engagement could be Human Resource practices. We can therefore posit that POS mediates the relationship between Supportive HR practices such as fairness of reward, participation in decision making, growth opportunities and engagement.

Proposition 3: Perceived Organisational Support (POS) mediates the relationship between Supportive HR policies and engagement.

Many researchers have suggested that employees are influenced not just by HR practices but how line managers implement these practices  (Sikora and Ferris, 2014; Guest and Bos-Nehles, 2013; Gratton and Truss, 2003) and it has been suggested that HR teams can, through their actions, contribute to the effectiveness of implementation of HR practices (Trullen et al, 2016). However there appears to be “a dearth of investigation into the impact of e.g. e-HR on the people involved; in particular, the (re) structuring of social relations between HR functions and line managers in the move away from face-to-face HR support services, to more technology-mediated ‘self-service’ relationships” (Francis et al, 2014, p 1327). The impact of HR delivery structures on line manager behaviours is currently a gap in the engagement literature.

Proposition 4: The HR delivery structure affects Front-Line Manager behaviours and in turn Perceived Organisational Support (POS) and engagement

We can conceptualise that supportive FLM behaviours such as supporting team members to solve problems, encouraging team members to develop new skills, to participate in decisions and to share feedback openly, all of which support engagement (May et al. 2004) will lead to the conditions necessary for engagement to occur and will impact the employee’s perception of support from the organisation. HR policies which support participation in decision making, fairness of rewards, and growth opportunities as well as access to HR advice and support may  lead to FLM behaviours which support engagement. A model and research framework which provides e.g. further insights into how FLMs and HR functions jointly influence engagement could help HR departments to better organise their teams to support the conditions necessary for engagement to occur.

The conceptual model attached (fig.1) builds on the existing engagement theory and explores in more detail the role of the FLM as well as the role which the HR function plays in influencing engagement. The model captures more comprehensively the complexity of the influence which the FLM and HR function can have on engagement and the interplay between these two organisational groups, providing a research framework to build on our existing understanding and theory of engagement.

Key words: Engagement, Line Manager, Human Resources, Social Exchange Theory