Employee Engagement, Job Attitudes, And Work Behavior: A Meta-analytic Test Of The Incremental Validity Of Employee Engagement

Although the commercially-popular construct of employee engagement has gained attention in scholarly work in recent years, several questions about the construct remain unresolved. In the current paper, I addressed several issues with previous engagement research by (a) meta-analyzing the relationship between employee engagement, task performance, contextual performance, absenteeism, and turnover, (b) using these meta-analytic estimates to fit a series of models in which engagement predicts both specific and broadly-defined work behaviors, and (c) estimating the unique predictive validity of engagement above and beyond job attitudes. Several regression equations and structural equation models were tested using a combination of previous meta-analytic correlations (k = 95) and original meta-analytic correlations (k = 12). Results of the study found that engagement does offer unique incremental validity over several work-related behaviors (task performance, ∆R2 = .037; contextual performance, ∆R2 = .025; turnover, ∆R2 = .083), however this incremental validity has been over-stated in previous research. Results also found that the A-factor (higher order attitudinal construct) is strongly related to behavioral engagement (higher order behavioral construct) (Γ = .62) suggesting that when attitudes and behaviors are examined on the same level of specificity there is a strong predictive relationship between the two. These results suggest that although engagement may not be as unique as previous research has implied it does offer utility in the sense that it acts as a proxy for the A-factor