Employee Engagement at the Organizational Level of Analysis

Macey and Schneider frame the construct of employee engagement at the individual level of analysis, but much of the interest in the practitioner and consulting communities (e.g., Buchanan, 2004; Jamrog, 2004) and several influential academic studies in this domain (e.g., Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002; Salanova, Agut, & Peiro, 2005) are framed and conducted at the organizational level. Macey and Schneider leave the level of analysis issue open but do suggest that adding additional levels of analysis to the research repertoire on employee engage-ment would be a fruitful direction for future research. Because research and practice are already moving in this direction (perhaps ahead of solid theory development), we pro-vide below a brief rationale for why it may be valuable to conceptualize engagement at the organizational level of analysis and offer a few suggestions for how researchers may want to proceed.