Employee engagement, organisational performance and individual well-being: exploring the evidence, developing the theory

The development of mainstream human resource management (HRM) theory has long been concerned with how people management can enhance performance outcomes. It is only very recently that interest has been shown in the parallel stream of research on the link between employee engagement and performance, bringing the two together to suggest that engagement may constitute the mechanism through which HRM practices impact individual and organisational performance. However, engagement has emerged as a contested construct, whose meaning is susceptible to ‘fixing, shrinking, stretching and bending’. It has furthermore not yet been scrutinised from a critical HRM perspective, nor have the societal and contextual implications of engagement within the domain of HRM been considered. We review the contribution of the seven articles in this special issue to the advancement of theory and evidence on employee engagement, and highlight areas where further research is needed to answer important questions in the emergent field that links HRM and engagement