It's a virtuous circle and the best of all worlds ".
Engagement - Definition.
Kahn (1990), was credited with conceptualizing the term personal engagement which he defines as "the harnessing of organisational members' selves to their work roles". In engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively and emotionally during role performances ". .
Kahn's study started with the work of Goffman (1961), as well as looking across disciplines such as psychology (Freud 1922), sociology (Merton 1957) and group theorists (Slater 1966, Smith & Berg 1987) who all documented the natural resistance of an individual, concerning becoming members of on-going groups and systems. The individual seeks to prevent total isolation or engulfment by being in a constant state of flux towards and away from the group (Kahn 1990). Kahn named this forward and backward flux as, 'personal engagement' and 'personal disengagement'. .
The cognitive aspect of employee engagement deals with the employees beliefs about organisation factors such as, how it is led and by whom and the working conditions which exist within the organisation. The emotional element deals with how the employee feels about each of the three aforementioned factors and if they possess a positive or negative attitude towards the organisations and its leader(s). The physical aspect of Kahn's definition relates to the physical energies employed by individuals in order to carry out their organisational role(s).
The literature concerning employee engagement poses a challenge due to the fact that there is no one universally applied definition to cover the topic of employee engagement. According to Baumruk (2004) employee engagement has been defined within the confines of emotional and intellectual commitment to the organisation or the quantity of discretionary effort, defined by Yankelovich and Immerwahr (1984), as the voluntary effort employees provide above and beyond what is required offered by employees in their job (Frank et al 2004).