Critical Approaches to Human Resource Management - Essay Example

Over the past decade, Boxall and Purcell (2011) posit that the worker engagement levels in the US have significantly fallen. As a result, a people strategy that is effective should be devised to stimulate high levels of engagement of employees in order to gain the much sort after competitive advantage in the most dynamic business environment to ever exist globally (Woods and West, 2010). Numerous studies have been conducted by dozens of firms and researchers with respect to the value of employee engagement (Holbeche and Springett, 2003).

All these studies have employed varied research methods, employee engagement measures, in addition to the extensive variety of varied measures of financial and operational performance; yet they all lead to the same conclusion, that “employee engagement or disengagement has a huge impact on the financial performance of individual organisations, and in the aggregate, a significant impact on the performance of the U.S. economy as a whole” (Schaufeli, Bakker and Salanova, 2006:703) The Role of Engagement The global economy has been experiencing significant shifts in the past decade (Woods and West, 2010). . Despite the fact that new strategies have been devised to respond to these shifts; Harter, Schmidt and Hayes (2002) believe that it is essential that the organisation’s success alongside the high performance of workers be maintained.

According to Boxall, Purcell and Wright (2007), the key strategy to implement to ensure this is to introduce processes that measure and improve the work engagement of the employees. Past research has over and over again made known that employee engagement has powerful links with a number of success factors in business organisations, for instance (Holbeche and Springett, 2003): i. Employee productivity ii. Employee efficiency/performance iii. Employee safety iv. Employee attendance and retention v.

Profitability vi. Customer loyalty and retention vii. Customer service and satisfaction Economic instabilities are on and off events and the way different business organisations react to these shifts in the economy determines or rather predict if the company will survive or how well it will succeed (Roberts and Davenport, 2002). Many organisations tend to focus less on management of their talent as well as on engaging their employees during periods of crisis and uncertain business forecasts and instead direct their efforts towards devising strategies to reduce costs incurred via slicing of bonuses, salaries, rewards, in addition to costs involving development of employees (Attridge, 2009).

Furthermore, Redman and Wilkinson (2009) report that some leaders without an eye for the future may go to an extend of thinking that employee engagement is not important since their employees are left with few or no options and as a result they will stay put in the organisation due to their need for job security. On the other hand, smart leaders with