The other day a colleague of mine who is a HR VP told me that employee engagement was “hot.” The way he stated it leads one to believe that employee engagement is a new concern, a new concept, a new philosophy, or, if you will, a new mantra.
I was a bit astonished if not perplexed. It never dawned on me that the notion of employee engagement had been on some invisible back burner and was suddenly emerging as a popular management tool since it has been and integral concern of organizational and management theory for decades. Indeed, a disproportionate amount of the literature in the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior is sharply focused on employee engagement. The terminology may be different and the variables augmented, but the same concepts are explored.
