Employee Engagement: Antecedents and Consequences

This dissertation examined the relationship between the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement in a defense acquisition organization. The objective of this study as to determine whether or not the eight satisfaction facets of the Index of Organizational Reactions (IOR) (1976) could be used as antecedents, engagement and consequences constructs in place of the antecedents, engagement and consequences constructs of the Saks (2006) model of employee engagement. This study used the following three research questions: 1) Are the antecedents of the IOR (kind of work, amount of work, physical work conditions, supervision and financial rewards) related to employee engagement constructs (company identification and co-workers)? 2) Are the antecedents of the IOR model (kind of work, amount of work, physical work conditions, supervision and financial rewards) related to consequences (career future)? 3) Are the employee engagement constructs (company identification and co-workers) related to consequences (career future)? This study utilized the Index of Organizational Reactions (1976) to sample a defense acquisition organization (N = 177) to assess the proposed empirical model. The quantitative data from the study was used to perform Pearson correlation on 17 hypotheses. All hypotheses were supported and indicated positive relationships were present among the variables representing the antecedents, engagement and consequences constructs of the empirical model. In addition, confirmatory factor analysis was utilized as was done in previous studies performed by Dunham, Smith and Blackburn (1977) and Lee (1984). After the initial component matrix was obtained, a varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization was applied and indicated that the same factors that were found in the Dunham et al. and Lee studies were found in this research, providing additional confirmation for the original validation of the IOR. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was also used in this research and the results indicated that gender was a significant effect on the results of this study. This study also utilized qualitative responses to the survey items to provide additional data to determine whether or not there were common themes amongst the comments and whether or not the comments were in agreement with the quantitative responses. Results indicated that further study is needed in the areas of supervision, kind of work, co-workers, physical work conditions and career future