To What Extent Do Managers’ Practices Contribute Towards Employee Engagement: A Case Study Of A Ministry In The Malta Public Administration

Engaged employees invest all their energy in their work to reach organisational objectives. Employees are engaged when they have meaningful work, they feel that the work environment is safe, they are not distracted with internal or external work environments and consequently can invest their energy in work to be psychologically available. Employee engagement can be influenced by various factors including management practices, and the organisational environment. Engaging the employees within the Public Administration can be challenging for managers since the Public Administration is regularised by a legal framework that sometimes restrict the managers to empower, and encourage, the employees to drive work performance. Moreover, the Malta Public Administration where this research has taken place, has experienced restructuring processes within the past years, which have provided an unstable environment for the employees due to change in processes that made it more challenging for the managers to maintain employee engagement. The dissertation aimed to explore the relationship between management practices and employee engagement. The research work focused on establishing the junior employee engagement levels following restructuring processes and investigated how the management practices affected these engagement levels. Furthermore, the research also explored the engaging practices used by the top management within the Ministry to engage the employees as well as, explore, through the top management within the Office of the Prime Minister, the Public Administration planned engagement strategies. The empirical findings established that the management practices have contributed to the moderately engaged junior employees following restructuring processes, and approximately between 20-30% of the junior employees were unhappy with the management engaging practices used within the Ministry. The findings also revealed that only 59% of the employees and managers confirmed commitment to stay within the Ministry for the foreseeable future. In addition, although a significant number of managers have attended for management and leadership training within the PA, the managers felt that they required more training in areas related to soft skills to relate better to the employees.