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Employee Engagement andOrganizational Behavior ManagementTimothy D. Ludwig a & Christopher B. Frazier aa Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USAPublished online: 07 Mar 2012.

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Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 32:75–82, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0160-8061 print/1540-8604 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01608061.2011.619439

DISCUSSION ARTICLE

Employee Engagement and OrganizationalBehavior Management

TIMOTHY D. LUDWIG and CHRISTOPHER B. FRAZIERAppalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA

Engagement is a “buzz” word that has gained popularityin Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Based on a “PositivePsychology” approach, engagement is perceived as a valuable statefor employees, because surveys on the construct have found it cor-relates with some organizational tactics (e.g., human resourcepolicies, procedural justice) and positive outcomes (e.g., growth,lower costs, lower absenteeism). Reviews of the engagement liter-ature suggest engagement is not clearly defined, which is com-mon with some popular cognitive/emotional constructs. PositivePsychology is nothing new to behavior analysis (Luthans, Youssef,& Rawski, 2011), which has many applications through the fieldof Organizational Behavior Management to create an “engaged”workforce and culture.

KEYWORDS engagement, industrial/organizational psychology,organizational behavior management

Employee engagement is a young and indistinct construct within organiza-tional research yet to be clearly defined. Nonetheless, it has become thelatest “buzz” word in management, sparking opportunistic interest in theacademic field. However, from a behavior analytic perspective, employees’“vigor” and “energy” may be simply a matter of managing contingenciesthrough the behavioral systems that include operational and managerialprocesses.

Employee engagement is not a well-defined construct, as many authorsdefine it differently. According to the Gallup Employee Engagement Survey

Address correspondence to Timothy D. Ludwig, Department of Psychology, AppalachianState University, Boone, NC 28608, USA. E-mail: ludwigtd@appstate.edu

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Analysis Tool (ESAT; Corporate Leadership Council, 2009) survey, engage-ment can be broken into rational and emotional engagement. Rationalengagement is defined as “the extent to which employees believe that man-agers, teams, or organizations have their self interest in mind (financial,developmental, or professional),” while emotional engagement is definedas “the extent to which employees value, enjoy, and believe in their jobs,managers, teams or organizations” (p. 4). Towers Perrin (2003) definesengagement as “employees’ willingness and ability to contribute to com-pany success . . . the extent to which employees put discretionary effortinto their work” (p. 1). Macey and Schneider (2008) add that engagementcontains organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB).

Moreover, engagement has been described as made up of differentpsychological states (or at least is correlated with states) such as involve-ment, attachment, mood (Macey & Schneider, 2008), job satisfaction, andorganizational commitment (Saks, 2006; Wefald, & Downey, 2008). PositiveAffectivity has also been highly correlated with engagement (Macey &Schneider, 2008). Of course, the causal directionality and “third variable”problem is pervasive in this research, because it is unclear if these psy-chological states lead to engagement, if engagement leads to these states,or if these states all covary with another variable altogether (e.g., companysuccess).

Variables that lead to engagement are numerous. A highly correlatedvariable in Saks’ (2006) review, as well as the large-scale study producedby Towers Perrin (2003), was job characteristics (cf., Hackman & Oldham,1976). These include challenging work, autonomy over decisions, and careeradvancement opportunities. Saks (2006) argued employees must be givenadequate resources to get their job done well. Auxiliary policies and facili-ties such as a day care center, gym, and cafeteria help employees balancetheir lives more efficiently with more flexibility, supposedly leading toengagement (Foursight Consulting, 2005; McLeish, 2008; Pitt-Catsouphes &Matz-Costa, 2008; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004).

Management behavior moderates the relationship between engage-ment and organizational outcomes (e.g., sales) and therefore can influ-ence employee behavior (Smith, Huelsman, Bergman, & Ludwig, 2010).Blessing White, Inc. (2008) state that managers must be engaged for theirsubordinates to be engaged. Additionally, survey data suggest that man-agement must be customer focused, communicate effectively, and have theemployees’ well-being as a high priority to produce engaged employees(Towers Perrin, 2003) because they have built “trust” (Chughtai & Buckley,2008). Organizational variables that may be related to engagement includehuman resources, policies, values, culture, technology, etc. (Towers Perrin,2003) that promote a perception of procedural justice (i.e., how fairemployees perceive the processes around outcomes; Saks, 2006).

Correlational research suggests the outcomes of engagement are indeedimpressive, as they speak directly to business results (Hyten, 2009).

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Engagement and OBM 77

Employee engagement been shown to be positively correlated to higherrevenue growth, a lower cost of goods sold, and negatively correlated withintentions to quit/turnover (Saks, 2006; Towers Perrin, 2003). Organizationsin the top quartile of employee engagement accrued 1% to 4% more in orga-nizational profits annually (Harter, Schmidt & Hayes, 2002). However, thecausality or directionality of such statements remain suspect. It is unclearwhether engagement creates the successful organizations or if successfulorganizations make employees more engaged or if both are a result ofanother variable such as managerial behavior (Smith et al., 2010).

Saks (2008) states, “The engagement concept . . . needs to be rolespecific rather than a cocktail of related constructs,” (pp. 42–43) and therebydisagrees with defining engagement as merely job satisfaction, organizationalcommitment, or an outcome of management caring (Saks, 2009). Saks (2008)suggests that “behavioral engagement” should be the research constructof interest because it is observable and is most directly related to humanperformance and the bottom line. We agree with Saks’ (2008, 2009) assess-ment as well as A. C. Daniels (2009), who states that engagement is simply“a non-specific non-scientific term used to describe the amount of positivereinforcement available in a workplace for value-added behavior” (p. 7).

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT: AN ALTERNATIVEVIEW OF ENGAGEMENT

A. C. Daniels (2009) argues a key variable that drives all organizational out-comes is human behavior: “If management practices, systems, and processesare not designed on the basis of known facts about behavior, no organiza-tion can expect to create a workplace where all employees consistently givetheir best” (p. 7). Indeed, the variables associated with engagement aboveare not uncommon to the science of behavior analysis applied to organiza-tions called Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), which works onimproving behavior without being concerned with or attempting to changepsychological traits, states, or other covert phenomena.

Reinforcement

A. C. Daniels (2009) suggests positive reinforcement is the most efficient wayto make behavior effective and create the kind of organizational culturalbehaviors that are credited to engagement. According to Daniels, posi-tive reinforcement has to be personal, immediate, contingent on behavior,and frequent. Geller (2003) recommends noncontingent rewards over pos-itive reinforcement, because it can be used to recognize individuals andgroups with financial or social outcomes. When delivered effectively bymanagement, such rewards can have a profound effect on a positive workenvironment. Geller (2003) suggests rewards create pleasant personal states

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as a consequence of receiving them. Skinner (1974) noted that positiveresults stemming from behavior can create a positive psychological statesuch as happiness. Gravina (2011) too suggests that responses to commonorganizational survey measurements, such as job satisfaction, organizationalcommitment, or even engagement, are classically conditioned responses.Also, Mawhinney (2011), in this issue, argues convincingly that “cumulativeeffects of reinforcers (punishers) contingent on performances will accountfor variations in performance-related satisfaction.” Perhaps engagement isthe label for the classically conditioned response to the copious amount ofsocial and other reinforcement associated with value-added behavior.

Adequate Resources

Deming (1986) famously said that it is management’s job to remove the bar-riers to employees’ success. OBM takes a similar view whereby availability ofresources serves as an antecedent to promote behaviors and to ensure thatbehaviors are maintained with the proper reinforcers. Take, for example,a story told by Ludwig (2011) where a manager complained that workerswere not doing housekeeping in an industrial plant. After an assessmentof antecedents and consequences, it was found that workers did not havethe right tools conveniently located proximal to their housekeeping behav-iors. Providing those resources (step ladders and work sinks) increased thebehavior regardless of any increase in an “engagement” score.

Management Behaviors

Many management actions that create “engaged” employees can beexplained from an OBM perspective and applied through intervention. OBMresearch is full of empirically tested communication tools: task clarification(Crowell, Anderson, Able, & Sergio, 1988; Rice, Austin, & Gravina, 2009;Slowiak, Madden, & Mathews, 2005), goal setting (Ludwig & Geller, 1997;Tittelbach, DeAngelis, Sturmey, & Alvero, 2007), checklists (Eikenhout, &Austin, 2005; Rodriguez et al., 2005), posted policies (Squires et al., 2007),and explicit rules (Johnson, Houmanfar, & Smith, 2010).

A related issue to management communication is management consis-tency. OBM research emphasizes the use of Behavioral Systems Analysis,including process maps of the managerial processes (Diener, McGee, &Miguel, 2009) to reveal places where work procedures, tasks, and reinforcersare ambiguous. When these ambiguities are exposed and corrected, behav-iors are better specified and reinforced, leading perhaps to the conditionsattributed to “engagement.”

A final management behavior that may be related to the conditionsof engagement is performance feedback (Crowell et al., 1988; Rice et al.,2009; Squires et al., 2007; Tittelbach et al., 2007). A. C. Daniels and

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J. E. Daniels (2004) explain that ambiguous verbal feedback can be a pun-isher and reduce behavior. Conversely, unambiguous feedback that is timely,objective, based on employee behavior, and linked to business results, goals,or valued consequences, can have a strong impact on behavior, especially ifthat behavior is self-generated.

Autonomy

Another aspect of engagement, also popular among noted social psychol-ogists (Allport, 1937; Deci & Ryan, 1985) is the concept of autonomy.This aspect of engagement is argued to be related to a “positive” culture(Saks, 2006; Towers Perrin, 2003). Since cultural variables are primarilymeasured with survey research, there are very few behavioral examplesof this relationship. However, A. C. Daniels (2000) and others (Geller,2002) have pointed to what may be called “Discretionary Behavior,” whereemployees go beyond what is discriminated by the reinforcers and engagein other behaviors that are desirable to the organization or community(OCB, in I/O Psychology terminology; Macey & Scheider, 2008). OBMresearch has shown that when given the opportunity to set their own goals(i.e., implicit rules), employees generalize desirable behaviors beyond theoriginal targeted behaviors specified in the goals (Ludwig, 2001; Ludwig& Geller, 1997). Ludwig and Geller (1997, 2001) call this phenomena“response generalization” and also suggest that there is a causal relation-ship between participatory intervention tactics and response generalization(Ludwig, 2001). Thus, when managers change the job design to allow formore autonomous behaviors, they may indeed find employees engagingin desirable behaviors beyond the original “targeted” suggestions (A. C.Daniels, 2009; Ludwig, 2001).

Experimental Causality

It is easy for organizations to gather data from their employees by givingthem surveys that may tell them valuable information (Blessing White, Inc.,2008). However, it is much more difficult for those organizations to uti-lize that information for effective behavior change. All of the engagementstudies reviewed above were based on correlational explorations betweensurvey data, psychological questionnaires, and organizational data. Whilethese exploratory studies may direct us toward high-impact interventionswhose impact maintains over time and may generalize to other behaviors,discretionary and otherwise, they are severely limited in the practical, causaladvice they can offer the practitioner. Indeed when investigating the Gallupcompany’s survey approach to engagement, which they sell for tens of thou-sands of dollars, we found that after the survey results are completed they

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only suggest that focus groups be convened to brainstorm how engagementcan be improved.

In contrast, behavior change in OBM studies is demonstrated withrobust repeated measures (within) experimental designs (e.g., ABA rever-sal, multiple baselines) gaining inferences of substantial causal relationships(Cook & Cambell, 1979; Kazdin, 1982). Thus, the OBM community is in a farbetter position to advise practitioners on specific methods to garner broadperformance improvement in a workforce.

We believe that research should continue to be conducted linking thecorrelational findings around engagement to OBM practices and behav-ioral change. When OBM can fill the gap left by Industrial/OrganizationalPsychology research through expanded terminology and scope (Geller,2003; Weigland & Geller, 2004), then it may indeed find itself back in themainstream of organizational literature and practice.

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