Topaz has been present in the Irish petrol service station market for the last 3 years. It took a foothold on the Irish market by acquiring and subsequently merging Statoil and Shell service stations, which through their re-branding of the acquired service stations, gave them a country wide presence in a matter of months.
In order to collect the data to complete the dissertation, the researcher will personally distribute employee engagement surveys to the assigned service stations. The survey is based on a report which was carried out by the CIPD in 2006, which attempted to measure the levels and drivers of employee engagement of employees in the UK. The results from the CIPD (2006) report were used as a benchmark by the researcher in analyzing the results from the data collection. .
The dissertation will look at employee engagement and how the component parts of employee engagement, namely cognitive, physical and emotional engagement measure up across the different sections of employees. The employee groupings are as follows: sales assistant, supervisor, assistant manager and manager. Looking at the employee cross section one aspect that interest the researcher is, are mangers more engaged than their subordinate counterparts?.
By carrying out this dissertation the researcher is hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the how engaged employees within the assigned Topaz service stations are as well as understanding the component parts which make up the employee engagement process. The researcher is also interested to find out what management can do to foster increased employee engagement as according to the CIPD (2006) report, managers are on overage more engaged than their subordinate counterparts. .
CHAPTER TWO.
LITERATURE REVIEW.
Why Employee Engagement is of Importance and Interest.
Employee engagement has become a heavily discussed topic in recent years. However, there is still ambiguity within the academic literature as to how employee engagement can be influenced by management.