Voice and employee engagement

Employee engagement has become a topic of considerable interest to academics and management practitioners. However, two versions have evolved relatively separately. Academics have assembled extensive evidence about the antecedents and consequences of attitudinal engagement, treating it as an individual level concept and demonstrating its potential utility. This version has little to say about voice except perhaps through its advocacy of job autonomy. Managers and consultants have adopted a broader, less clearly defined version, termed here ‘organizational engagement’, as a mechanism for increasing employee commitment, motivation, and performance. Although voice has been advocated as a mechanism for enhancing organizational engagement, the evidence suggests that in practice the scope for voice is very restricted. The analysis concludes that despite some rhetoric, employee engagement is unlikely to provide a mechanism for maintaining or enhancing employee voice.