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Engagement Intent: Connecting or Disconnecting Employees?
Research Learning and Benchmarking Group Invitation for Leaders Focused on Improving Employee Engagement
Lead Researcher: Theresa M. Welbourne, PhD
This research project is a follow up to the Incentive Research Foundation technical report titled: Engaged in what?
Creating connections to performance with rewards, recognition and roles. The report documents the history of
employee engagement, definitions, research and outcomes of engagement as well as reviewing a case study of the
Cleveland Clinic. The unique contribution of this report is the suggestion that role-based behavior provides a lens to
connect engagement activities with firm strategy and organizational-level outcomes.
The report also clearly suggests that without this type of specific linkage, the ability of employee engagement
programs to have measurable business results is dramatically limited. Role theory provides a unique and valid lens
for taking the powerful work on employee engagement and focusing it on the right behaviors needed to drive
outcomes. The tools that are developed from this line of work help leaders improve alignment by taking employee
engagement work forward.
Engagement Intent
After conducting interviews and discussions with a number of professionals regarding the original report, we realize
the focus should be on what we are now calling engagement intent. This term captures the heart of the "engaged in
what" question, and it does so in a way that helps leaders take their engagement projects to the next level. Basically,
we are investigating the degree to which various employee engagement programs are intending to change employee
role-based behavior and then the link between this intent and the subsequent behavioral changes along with teamlevel, business unit, and firm performance changes. Using the role-based model, introduced in the IRF technical
report, we explore role as the "black box" between intent and outcomes.
Ways to Engage in the Research
In an effort expand this work and develop a tool kit that will be used by organizations involved in this project, we are
initiating a group of firms. We now are seeking organizations interested in becoming part of the working group. Four
institutions are sponsoring this work and are now seeking organizations to join the group:
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Incentive Research Foundation
Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California
Corporate Research Forum, London, UK
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Through the research institutions and participating group members, we will develop a global research to meet the
needs of the complex organizations interested in this work. Our goal is to, together, make employee engagement
work more meaningful to today's businesses and employees.
Research Commitment
Firms involved in this project will be expected to take part in a research project aimed at examining the links between
engagement efforts, role-based behaviors and business outcomes. We are asking for involvement in a few different
ways (organizations do not have to engage in all of the work, but the more they do, the greater their learning
experience):
PHASE I: ORGANIZATION PROFILING
Mapping engagement, intent, role-based behavior and outcomes
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The research team will access written employee engagement goals and/or related materials about
the programs.
The research team will need access to any engagement surveys and results.
The team will need to interview key individuals in the firm involved in the engagement work; this may
include executives in HR and within the overall company (e.g. CEO, CFO - executive team).
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Documentation of engagement-related interventions, including formal and informal HR programs will
be reviewed and documented. The team is particularly interested in any rewards and recognition
systems that are considered to be part of the engagement program. The research team is also
looking for any programs implemented that may have supported or perhaps gotten in the way of the
linkages between engagement and behavioral outcomes.
The research team will need to review any outcomes, action plans or evidence of change as a result
of the engagement programs.
From all of the work above, the researchers will develop a profile of the participating firms, including
engagement intent, engagement efforts, links to roles, and the relationship between role-based
behavior and outcomes.
PHASE 2: GATHERING NEW EVIDENCE
Surveys with managers of the participating firms
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For this work, we will distribute surveys to members of the management team at the firm. We are
seeking new data that specifically measures aspects about role-based performance.
This information will be merged with the historical analysis and provide additional information on the
degree to which engagement intent supports strategy and more data on the links between intent,
role-based performance, and outcomes. It will also define any missing links-roles that should be
important that might not be considered at this time. In other words, we will help the participating
companies by providing them with roadmaps focusing on ways they can take their engagement
programs further to better enhance performance outcomes.
For those firms interested, we have supplemental tools that could be used as part of the research.
Managers can do assessments of employees using the role-based performance scale (this takes
about 3 minutes per employee). Also, for managers, we can use the 3-minute 360, which also
focuses on role-based performance. All of these additional tools provide further diagnostic data for
the research team, and in addition, it gives the participating company more information for their own
benchmarking and learning.