Title: Leader Emotional Engagement, Intelligence and Development (LEEID)
Names of Authors & Contact Details: Dean Horsman, Senior Lecturer, Leeds Business
School, Leeds Beckett University (d.horsman@leedsdbeckett.ac.uk)
Leeds Business School, Faculty of Business & Law, Leeds Beckett University, The Rose
Bowl, 1 Portland Gate, City Campus, Leeds, LS1 3HB
Stream: Employee Engagement
Submission Type: Refereed Paper
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distinction between the physical,
cognitive, and in particular the emotional paths along which people personally engage and
disengage. The paper focuses more on the emotional meaning, sensemaking and learning
that employees have about work from a socially constructed perspective and the impact that
this has on their ‘emotional engagement’.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores the development of employee
engagement using an ‘integrated literature review’ as a form of secondary research.
Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a more established and extensively debated
academic concept, whereas ‘emotional engagement’ could be regarded as an emerging topic
in a number of disciplines, with differing conceptualisations and related issues.
Findings – The paper found that there are four individual ‘bonds’ that need to be established
in order to develop the right social climate for employee engagement. The paper goes on to
suggest that a situated perspective on emotion would emphasize the role of social context in
the production and management of an emotion, and the reciprocal influence of emotion on
the evolving social context, very much in the vein of socially constructed learning (Lave &
Wenger, 1990). From a leadership and organizational performance perspective, the potential
to learn to become more self-aware of one’s emotions through a situated approach to
emotions is a potential driver or enabler.
Practical implications – The paper explores if there is a link between employees and their
manager/leader’s emotional engagement, intelligence and development through learning that
may be linked to organizational performance; initially through a review of the literature.
Social implications – This paper goes on to suggest that because emotions are dependent on
and activated by social relationships, the social climate and social dimensions of work ought
to be given greater acknowledgement.
Originality/value – Emotional engagement is a relatively new and emerging concept within
the employee engagement literature.
Keywords – Employee Engagement, Emotional Engagement, Emotional Intelligence,
Leadership, Management, Social Capital
Title: Leader Emotional Engagement, Intelligence and Development (LEEID) : A
Review of the Literature
Introduction
As the concept of employee engagement has grown in popularity and use, there have been
significant changes in definition, measurement, and conceptualization (Bakker and
Demerouti, 2008; Wefald, 2008). Academic research has lagged behind practice (Macey and
Schneider, 2008), the practitioner approach and the academic approach (Zigarmi et al., 2009),
although some more rigorous academic research has emerged (Christian, Garza, and
Slaughter, 2011; Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter, 2001; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006). For
many academics, there is a significant gap of understanding on the topic (Macey and
Schneider, 2008; Wefald, 2008), its history, and current use in HRM/HRD (Shuck and
Wollard, 2009). The popularity of the concept in the practitioner community as well as the
need for answers and the re-emergence of the concept in the academic community have led to
differing perspectives (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes, 2002; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006;
Wefald and Downey, 2009). Research, however, has shown that the concept of employee
engagement shares an important relationship with organizational and performance outcome
variables such as ‘going the extra mile’ (CIPD, 2005), discretionary effort and intention to
turnover (Shuck, 2011) as well as organisational performance (Rich, et al., 2010).
Research Purpose
There is much academic debate about what engagement is, what it looks like, how it is
defined and how organisations can harness it in terms of individual, team and ultimately
improved organisational performance (Christian et al., 2011; Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes,
2002; Saks, 2006). Such differing perspectives offer a disjointed maze of models and
frameworks on which to base future work around this emerging concept, affecting the
application of the construct for both scholars and practitioners alike. An alternative to
studying the whole debateable concept of employee engagement for the author in this paper,
drawing upon the work of Kahn (1990), was to investigate the distinction between the
physical, cognitive, and in particular the emotional paths along which people personally
engage and disengage. The purpose of the paper was to focus more on the emotional
meaning, sensemaking and learning that employees have about work from a socially
constructed perspective (Griffiths and Scarantino, 1997) including the roles of
manager/leader, the team(s), and organisation that they work for and the impact that this has
on their ‘emotional engagement’.
Research Question
To explore if there is a link between employees and their manager/leader’s emotional
engagement, intelligence and development through learning that may be linked to
organizational performance; initially through a review of the literature.
Methodology
The intention in this paper was to explore the development of employee engagement
throughout the past 30 years or so using an ‘integrated literature review’ as a form of
secondary research. The “integrative literature review is a distinctive form of research that
generates new knowledge” about an emerging topic of study (Torraco, 2005: 356).
Employee engagement is increasingly becoming a more established and extensively debated
academic concept, whereas ‘emotional engagement’ could be regarded as an emerging topic
in a number of disciplines, with differing conceptualisations and related issues. The
integrative literature review in this paper as suggested by Torraco (2005) involved identifying
the issue(s); selecting the review as an appropriate research strategy; conducting a review of
the relevant literature; then analysing and critiquing the literature to arrive at some insight or
synthesis of the issue(s). The purpose was to define and situate the concept(s) within the
HRM and HRD and organisational behaviour fields of study, whilst being inclusive of other
professional areas such as internal communications, organizational development and strategic
development. This was further expanded to include specific discourse regarding ‘emotional
engagement’ and/or attachment, emotional intelligence, individual and social identity, selfefficacy and social capital within the areas of learning and development, leadership and
management development and individual, team and organizational performance.
Method
For this review it is simply my intention to determine, analyse, and organise the existent
literature across various disciplines and ideally determine a more refined working definition
and conceptual model and/or framework drawn from a synthesis of the literature. Ultimately,
at this stage the author sought to analyse any contradictory evidence that is appearing; where
there is a change in a trend or direction of a phenomena and how it is reported; and when
research emerges in different fields (Torraco, 2005).
As the principal focus of this review was academic in nature, the review of literature was
mainly focused only on scholarly works that informed the academic understanding of
employee engagement. Additionally some practitioner literature that was derived from
professional associations (e.g. the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD))
and other sources such as reports that had some research underpinning. To conduct a broad,
scholarly, multidisciplinary approach, the author searched the fields of Human Resources
(HR), HRM, HRD, business, education, learning, management, philosophy, psychology,
sociology, and health care. The databases searched included the following: Social Science
Citation Index (SSCI), PsycInfo, ABI/Inform, Proquest, Jstor, the Academy of Management
database, and all four Academy of Human Resource Development Journals (e.g., Advances in
Human Resource Development, Human Resource Development Review, Human Resource
Development International, and Human Resource Development Quarterly). Amazon. com
and Google Scholar were additionally used as data collection sources for available scholarly
books. The keywords ‘emotion’, ‘engagement’, ‘emotional engagement’, ‘employee
engagement’, ‘job engagement’, ‘personal engagement’ ‘work engagement’ and ‘workplace
engagement’ were used independently to cast a wide net on existing literature.
The search was conducted in mid-2014 and limited to articles with keywords appearing in the
abstract or title published in English language peer-reviewed journals or scholarly books.
The search generated 751 publications for review. Publications were screened for relevance
as determined by examining each title and abstract (Torraco, 2005) to ensure the article was
about some aspect of emotional and/or employee engagement and that keywords were not
paired together by chance. Any article containing an intentional use of a key word(s) was
deemed relevant for review, downloaded, and saved for further reading. For example, a
sentence that read “Community Engagement, Personal Responsibility and Self Help in Cuba's
Health System Reform” (Luis, I. et al. 2012: 44), would not be considered relevant; however,
a sentence that read “. . . to explore the conditions at work in which people personally
engage” (Kahn, 1990: 692) was considered relevant.
For analysis and eventual synthesis of existing literature, all identified relevant literature (N =
c210) was read and organized using open coding and constant comparative methods (Glaser
& Strauss, 1967, Wolfswinkel et al., 2013). Such grounded theory methods appeal to
researchers that want a clear philosophical base for theory development and to discover
meaning in existing data that is ‘grounded’ in empirical research. Consideration was given to
the possibility of using a concept matrix that lists the key concepts of a topic along one axis
of the matrix and the articles in which they were addressed along the other axis. Entries in
the cells of the matrix show more frequently used concepts and their sources in the literature
(Salipante et al., 1982; Webster and Watson 2002). This, however, was felt to be too time
consuming in light of the fixed period in which this paper had to be prepared, although the
author will revisit this in updating this review for his DBA thesis. In light of this, the author
identified seminal works that had been cited frequently and where these seminal articles
appeared elsewhere was indicative of more robustness amongst the academic community.
The author, therefore, felt that these and other works of influence including any definitions
therein, could be noted using citation software, uploaded to or from the Mendeley database
and referenced using thematic data analysis by means of tags.
Findings - A Review of Scholarly Frameworks and Concepts
Definitions of Employee Engagement
The phrase ‘engagement’ has been found in the literature since the early 1990s, beginning
with the work of Kahn (1990, p.694) who defined ‘personal engagement’ as “the harnessing
of organization members' selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and
express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.” Kahn
(1990) identified ‘personal engagement’ as having three dimensions – cognitive (rational) 1,
affective (emotional) and physical (behavioural). He suggested that emotional engagement
in terms of people empathizing with others at work, or feeling satisfaction/dissatisfaction
with their performance. Importantly for Kahn (1992 and 2010, cited in Albrecht et al.) is the
notion of how employees present themselves at work (engaged) as opposed to being absent
1
The author has used italics throughout this paper to give emphasis to connections that he is making to recurring themes that
have come out of his research to date that appear to share some commonality. These italicised words are not the words of
the academics who are cited herein.
(disengaged). Despite this there is no widely accepted definition of employee engagement
currently in use and Saks (2006: 600) stated that “Much of what has been written about
employee engagement comes from the practitioner literature and consulting firms. There is a
surprising dearth of research on employee engagement in the academic literature.” Christian
et al. (2011) went on to conclude that research in employee engagement has been
‘beleaguered’ by various inconsistent definitions of the concept. As the concept of employee
engagement has grown in popularity and use; a google search on the 3rd February 2015
returned 22,800,000 articles; it is evident that the concept is becoming ever more popular.
In the last 30 years, however, employee engagement has undergone significant changes in
definition, measurement, and conceptualization (Bakker & Demerouti, 2008; Wefald, 2008).
According to Macey & Schneider (2008) research in the scholarly community has lagged
somewhat behind practice, although rigorous academic research has emerged (Christian,
Garza, & Slaughter, 2011; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006).
There is a significant gap of understanding on what employee engagement is (Macey &
Schneider, 2008; Wefald, 2008), its history, and current use in HRM/HRD (Shuck &
Wollard, 2010). Understandably, the popularity of the concept in the practitioner community
as well as the need for answers and the re-emergence of the concept in the academic
community have led inevitably to differing perspectives: the practitioner approach and the
academic approach (Zigarmi et al., 2009). This is evident in the rise of and extant literature
around ‘burnout’ linking employee engagement with the High Performance Work Practices
movement in the 1990’s / 2000’s, particularly in the US, Europe and the UK (CIPD, 2005).
The main focus, however, of this review is on the academic approach to employee
engagement, which is a recent, re-emerging phenomenon (Rich et al., 2010; Saks, 2006;
Wefald & Downey, 2009). One of the key similarities, however, between the academic
research and HRM/HRD practice (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002; Saks, 2006) has shown
that the concept of employee engagement shares an important relationship with
organizational and performance outcome variables such as ‘going the extra mile’ (CIPD,
2005), discretionary effort and intention to turnover (Shuck, 2010) as well as organisational
performance (Rich et al. 2010; Robertson-Smith and Markwick, 2009). With particular
reference to HRD and using only the search term employee engagement, Shuck and Wollard
(2010) queried several scholarly and practitioner databases and found that as few as 159 peerreviewed articles were published on the subject between 1990 and 2010. Of the 159
published, a mere 26 were considered empirically driven scholarly research. According to
Shuck and Wollard (2010) only in 2009 did the first article containing the term employee
engagement appear in an Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD)–sponsored
journal (Chalofsky & Krishna, 2009).
However, there are a number of authors who have defined various terms around engagement,
for example, ‘employee engagement’ (Harter et al., 2002), ‘job engagement’ (Rich et al.,
2010), ‘personal engagement’ (Kahn, 1990), and ‘work engagement’ (Bakker & Demerouti,
2008) that through the regularity of citation would suggest some level of cognate synergy,
which will be discussed in the next section. In the context of HR practitioners, Fleck and
Inceoglu (2010) agreed with Macey & Schneider (2008: 4) that the term ‘employee
engagement’ is taken to mean some or all of “involvement, commitment, passion,
enthusiasm, focused effort, and energy.” Fleck and Inceoglu (2010) go on to suggest that
many studies evidence a strong relationship between engagement and organizational
performance such as profitability, revenue growth, earnings per share, and employee
turnover, which has conferred some level of legitimacy to the concept and rise in popularity
(Macleod & Clarke, 2009). Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 31) state that “development of precise
and agreed-upon definitions of the construct of engagement has lagged behind the rapid
uptake of the construct in practice.” Macey and Schneider (2008) suggest that current
definitions of engagement include defining it as a trait, a state, a set of behaviors,
characteristics of the work environment, or a combination of these.
For Kahn (1990: 700), engagement is the “simultaneous employment and expression of a
person’s ‘preferred self’ in task behaviors that promote connections to work and to others,
personal presence (physical, cognitive, and emotional), and active, full role performance.”
On the other hand ‘personal disengagement’ means “the uncoupling of selves from work
roles; in disengagement, people withdraw and defend themselves physically, cognitively, or
emotionally during role performances” (Kahn, 1990: 694). “People's behaviours display an
evacuation or suppression of their expressive and energetic selves in discharging role
obligations”, which he calls ‘role disengagement’ (Kahn, 1990, p.701). In role
disengagement, demands guide task behaviours without the interplay between internal
thoughts (cognitive) and feelings (emotional) and external requirements that characterize
moments of personal engagement. They become physically uninvolved in tasks, cognitively
unvigilant, and emotionally disconnected from others in ways that hide what they think and
feel, their creativity, their beliefs and values, and their personal connections to others. (Kahn,
1990, p.702)
Maslach et al.’s (1997) burnout-antithesis approach focused on the lack of some
psychological states such as exhaustion and the presence of positive psychological states such
as involvement. For Maslach et al. (1997), an engaged employee exhibits positive energy,
feels involved with the job, and feels that their contributions are productive. Engaged
employees have positive energy focused towards their work and a consistent commitment to
the quality of their work (Maslach et al. 2001). The differentiation between an engaged and a
disengaged employee is the degree of personal investment an employee has in their task
performance. Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter (2001: 417) go on to define employee
engagement as “a persistent, positive, affective-motivational state of fulfilment in employees
that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” It can be noted later that this
definition has been further developed by Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma and Bakker
(2002: 74) where it shares a number of key similarities, however, Maslach, Schaufeli and
Leiter’s (2001: 417) earlier definition also suggests that employee engagement is an
affective-motivational state.
Harter et al. (2002: 269) define employee engagement as “the individual’s involvement and
satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work.” In their meta-analysis study of businessunit-level relationships between employee satisfaction, employee engagement and business
outcomes they used an instrument that was developed from studies of work satisfaction, work
motivation, supervisory practices, and work-group effectiveness. Their underlying research
at Gallup was based on ‘positive psychology’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) where
they studied the characteristics of successful employees and managers and productive work
groups. Throughout their research, which is both quantitative and qualitative, they indicated
the importance of the supervisor/manager and their influence over the engagement level of
employees and their satisfaction with their employer. The instrument that they have used and
continue to use is the Gallup Workplace Audit (GWA), which is composed of an overall
satisfaction item plus 12 items that measure employee perceptions of work characteristics and
is more popularly known at the Gallup Q12 (Harter et al. 2002: 269).
According to Harter et al. (2002: 269) the GWA items are antecedents of personal job
satisfaction and other affective (emotional) constructs akin to Kahn (1990). As in Kahn’s
conceptualization, they see engagement occurring when ‘individuals are emotionally
connected to others and cognitively vigilant.’ Employees are emotionally and cognitively
engaged when they know what is expected of them (job demands), have what they need to do
their work (job resources), have opportunities to feel an impact and fulfilment in their work
(personal resources), perceive that they are part of something significant with coworkers who
they trust (work engagement), and have chances to improve and develop (performance) –
note the JD-R Work Engagement Model (Figure 1, Bakker & Demerouti, 2007, 2008; Bakker
& Leiter, 2010 below). The importance of the GWA for Harter et al. (2002) is that if the
items make sense to employees and managers it is more likely that people will accept the
instruments results and will motivate them to take action as a result of the feedback based on
such items. Gallup (2006 cited in Robertson-Smith & Marwick, 2009) proposes that
employees can be divided into groups of engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged.
Figure 1: The JD-R Work Engagement Model
Schaufeli et al. (2002: 74) define work engagement "as a positive, fulfilling, work-related
state of mind that is characterised by vigor, dedication, and absorption", which Schaufeli,
Bakker and Salanova (2006) go on to suggest is a motivational – psychological state akin to
Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter’s (2001: 417) earlier definition. Yalabik et al. (2013: 2802)
defined ‘work engagement’ as “an independent, persistent, pervasive, positive and fulfilling
work-related affective – cognitive and motivational – psychological state.” Yalabik et al.
(2013) suggest that this definition is consistent with the European Engagement Model
(Schaufeli et al. 2006; Bakker and Demerouti 2008; Salanova and Schaufeli 2008) and is
operationalized in the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES).
Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 31-32) go on to report on a model of engagement that they
developed as an attempt to address the negative implications of such conceptual diversity for
both research and practice. They had two underlying principles that formed the core of their
model; the first was that engagement is defined as a state that people can be in when they
perform at work, the intensity of which can vary over time and from day to day. The second
principle is that it was necessary to separate out three areas that are often conflated in the
engagement literature; namely predictors of the state of engagement, the state of engagement
itself, and the consequences of being in this state of engagement (see Figure 2 below).
Figure 2 – Model of Engagement
Drivers of
engagement
State of
engagement
 Person-job fit
 Personorganization fit
 Energy
 Absorption
 Alignment
 Identification
Engagement driven
behaviours
 Effort
 Extra-role
 Advocacy
Organizational
outcomes
 Profit
 Low staff
turnover
 Customer
satisfaction
Personal
Outcomes
Personal
Dispositions
 Personality
 Motivation
Source: Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 32)
 Job satisfaction
 Career
progression
Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 32) state that “By treating engagement as a state, and separating
the state of engagement from behaviours expected as a consequence of being in a state of
engagement, problems of ambiguity are avoided.” For Fleck and Inceoglu (2010: 35)
engagement is a psychological state that employees can be in when they are performing their
work roles akin to Kahn (1990: 694).
The consistent element in all of the aforementioned definitions apart from Maslach et al.’s
(1997) burnout-antithesis approach is that of ‘positive’ engagement and employee
engagement being a psychological affective-motivational state (Fleck and Inceoglu, 2010).
Indeed the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) report into employee engagement defines it
as “A positive attitude held by the employee towards an organization and its values. An
engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve
performance within the job and for the benefit of the organization.” Robinson et al. (2004: 4).
The author of this paper in his earlier thinking process defined employee engagement “as an
employee's positive emotional attachment to their job and/or colleagues and/or organization
which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work.” (Dean
Horsman, 2012). From a work perspective, the IES suggest that organizations must work to
develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer
and employee. In line with Kahn’s (1990) definition, Truss et al. (2006) define employee
engagement as "being positively present during the performance of work by willingly
contributing intellectual effort (cognitive), experiencing positive emotions (affective) and
meaningful connections to others (social behaviour)."
Fleck and Inceoglu (2010) use four facets to describe the state of engagement located within
a two-dimensional framework (see Table 1).
Table 1: Facets of the State of Engagement
Personal engagement
Job engagement
Organizational
engagement
Cognitive
Affective
Rational
Emotional
How the business case (the
head) determines the work
that is done (behaviour).
How feelings (the heart)
manifest themselves in
doing work (behaviour).
Absorption
Energy
Employees lose themselves
in their work, and
experience a sense of
engrossment when doing
their work (‘flow’,
Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).
The energy employees draw
from their work.
Alignment
Identification
Employees’ views of the
direction of the organisation
are aligned with the
direction in which the
organization is being taken.
The emotional bond
between the employee and
the organization.
Source: adapted by the author from Fleck and Inceoglu (2010)
Causes and Antecedents of Engagement at an Individual and Organizational Level
Sparrow & Balain (2010) referred to four individual ‘bonds’ (Pierce et al. 2001) that need to
be established in order to develop the right social climate for employee engagement. Firstly,
people need to have a motivation and incentive to bond – a reason and a desire for social
membership (with either the team, department or organization), which includes feelings
(affect or emotions) and beliefs regarding the reasons why they want to maintain a
relationship with, or their membership of the team, department, organization. Then there
needs to be some organizational identification, whereby people use the characteristics of the
organization they work for to define themselves. Then there has to be a process of
internalization – the personal learning, internal recognition and personal adoption of the
values and goals of the organization. Finally, there has to be a sense of psychological
ownership – an attitudinal state of mind involving feelings (affect or emotions) of being
psychologically tied to an object and a sense of responsibility and obligation that comes from
the feeling of ownership. Sparrow & Balain (2010) argue that such ‘bonds’ should be
included in definitions and measures of engagement and in practical terms, to reverse
engineer performance, HR Directors will need to know which specific, or bundle, of HR
practices create these bonds which, in turn, improve intermediate performance.
According to Saks (2006, 2008) these four bonds collectively may create two conditions: job
engagement (specific to the role task an employee is principally hired to perform) and
organizational engagement (other roles that an employee may play as part of the larger
organization). Each predicts different intermediate performance outcomes, such as job
satisfaction (how content an individual is with their job), motivation (a state of arousal and
reason to act towards a desired goal), discretionary effort, and job and organizational
commitment (being bound intellectually and/or emotionally to course of action, purpose or
behavior). This leads the author to ask, is there a link between a person’s emotions, feelings
(affect), their intelligence, and ultimately their attitudes and behavior that can be embraced
positively by an organization in the form of ‘emotional engagement’?
Emotion and Affect
So what is the link between a person’s emotions, feelings (affect) and their intelligence which
can lead to positive changes in their attitudes and behavior? According to Goldie (2007) the
way that we think about emotions has changed over the years. The collection of twelve
papers and other writings of Robert Solomon (2003) demonstrate how his philosophical
views on emotions had developed over 30 years. Prior to this, philosophers would generally
defer any discussion of emotion to psychologists and physiologists, who would tend to
identify emotion with feeling (or affect) such as William James in 1884. James (1884, cited
in Goldie, 2007) suggested that ‘feelings are the emotion’, whereas Solomon (1973, 1976,
2003) reconceived emotion not as being just feeling of one’s bodily state, but as a kind of
judgement, where ‘emotions are judgements’. According to Griffiths (2010: 22) these
judgements are “mental states with intentional content.”
Following Solomon’s (1973, 1976) so called ‘cognitive’ theory of emotion, a number of
philosophers in the 1980’s came up with their own variations on this theme, including
Griffiths (1989, 2010: 22), who stated that Solomon was “the type-specimen of the ‘simple
judgement theory’ unadorned with protective auxiliary hypotheses.” Despite his objections
to Solomon’s simple theory, Griffiths noted that Solomon’s work was very different from
other philosophical authors in the 1980’s by suggesting that Solomon was heavily influenced
by the existentialist idea that we are responsible for our emotions. Solomon’s view is that
responsibility requires choice in that if we are to be responsible for our emotions, then it is
necessary that we choose our emotions, in much the same way that we choose our actions.
This is linked to Solomon’s (1973) other claim that we ‘choose our emotions’ and hence bear
responsibility for them. However, this view has led to the greatest criticism, so in later
clarifications (Solomon, 2004) he made it clear that ‘choice’ was a polemical way to describe
a much broader sense of agency (Griffiths, 2010: 23). Solomon also conceded that his thesis
applies to emotions conceived as extended episodes of thought and feeling. According to
Griffiths (010: 23) this is a very different view of emotion from that suggested by
contemporary psychologists and affective neuroscientists, where emotions are thought of as
brief episodes involving measurable physiological responses.
According to Goldie (2007: 108) who suggests that what is necessary for being held
responsible for some state/agency (a belief, a desire, an emotion) is not choice as such, but
rather that the state/agency is in some way open to reason or reason-responsive. It is here,
where some contemporary authors such as Goleman (1996) have explored the whole notion
of emotional intelligence, where the idea of emotional self-awareness and our way of
thinking (rationality) becomes important in itself. Solomon (2003) made use of a distinction
between the ability to have an emotion and the ability to use it, which in emotional
intelligence terms is self-awareness and self-expression respectively. It is in our use of the
emotions; or rather in our cultivation of the skills needed to use them that Solomon suggests
is the primary locus of our responsibility. It is here where the early seeds of emotional
intelligence bear some support around emotional learning, which is open to reason or reasonresponsiveness. Solomon (1993: ix) stated, “The idea of emotions without learning, without
an ‘upbringing’, or without a context is no idea of emotions at all.” He draws upon
comparisons of rhesus macaque monkeys and human beings where he suggests that we learn
to produce the same emotional behaviours in response to subtler aspects of social context,
and by doing so we are able to better manage social interactions with others (transactional
perspective).
Griffiths (2010) like Solomon goes on to state that this developing ‘transactional’ perspective
in the psychology of emotions suggests that emotions are things people do and it emphasizes
the effects of having an emotion (e.g. costs and benefits), rather than the situations that
precede emotions. An example of this is the effect anger has on the person to whom it is
directed and on the third parties involved, rather than on the nature of the transgression which
is the object of the anger. Emotional Intelligence is the ability of a person to understand and
manage both their own emotions and those of the people they interact with.
Griffiths (2010) goes on to suggest that another feature of the transactional perspective that
he shares with Solomon (1984) is the opposition to the ‘hydraulic’ model, in which emotions
are involuntary explosions or overflows. Although this is probably an intuitive view of
emotion, it makes very little biological or neuroscientific sense. Griffiths and Scarantino
(2009) argue that the ‘transactionalist’ perspective constitutes a parallel in affective science to
the ‘situated’ perspective in cognitive science. For them, situated cognitive science is the
study of how minds coupled with environments are able to collectively produce effective
behavior. Griffith and Scarantino (2007, cited in Griffith, 2010: 24) go on to suggest that in a
similar way, a situated perspective on emotion would emphasize the role of social context in
the production and management of an emotion, and the reciprocal influence of emotion on
the evolving social context, very much in the vein of socially constructed learning (Lave &
Wenger, 1990).
In terms of emotional learning and performance, there is an ongoing debate into how you
measure emotional intelligence? According to Muyia (2010) there are currently three main
instruments designed to measure emotional intelligence that are most widely used: the Mayer,
Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), Emotional Competence Inventory
(ECI), and Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) (1997, 2000) . It is acknowledged
in the academic literature that there are strengths and weaknesses with these instruments,
however; Muyia concluded that despite the flaws it has been established that “Emotional
intelligence is important in predicting performance and successful life outcomes, that it has
the potential to be learned, and can lead to improved performance by both employees and
leaders in organizations” (2010, 681). From a leadership and organizational performance
perspective, the potential to learn to become more emotionally intelligent or at least more
self-aware of one’s emotions through a situated approach to emotions is a potential driver or
enabler. Griffiths and Scarantino (2009: 437) identified four key themes in a situated
approach to emotions:
1. Emotions are designed to function in a social context: an emotion is often an act of
relationship reconfiguration brought about by delivering a social signal.
2. Emotions are forms of skilful engagement with the world which need not be mediated
by conceptual thought.
3. Emotions are scaffolded by the environment, both sychronically in the unfolding of a
particular emotional performance and diachronically, in the acquisition of an
emotional repertoire.
4. Emotions are dynamically coupled to an environment which both influences and is
influenced by the unfolding of the emotion.
What is of particular relevance to this study that differs from Griffiths and Scarantino’s
(2009) second theme of the situated approach to emotions, however, is the challenge that
skilful engagement with emotions that are mediated by conceptual reason, drawing upon
Solomon’s reason-responsiveness could support Kahn’s (1990) view that ‘personal
engagement’ has three dimensions – cognitive (rational), affective (emotional) and physical
(behavioural).
Emotional Engagement
Kahn (1990) saw emotional engagement very much in terms of people empathizing with
others at work, or feeling satisfaction/dissatisfaction with their performance. Kahn did not
actually use the term ‘emotional engagement’, nor did May and his colleagues (May et al
2004) when they operationalized Kahn’s theory. They measured the emotional dimension of
engagement by asking people if they felt they ‘put their heart into the job’ and whether they
felt their feelings were affected by how they performed on the job. The phrase ‘emotional
engagement’ may have been introduced by Dreyfus (2004) who discussed emotional
engagement in activities as a sign of expertise as opposed to the ‘rule-following’
(transactional) stance of the beginner/novice (Dreyfus, 2004: 179).
Fleming et al (2005) went on to write about the ‘emotional engagement’ of customers and
employees with the organization, linking this with satisfaction and to desirable financial and
operational outcomes (i.e. performance). Fleming et al (2005) departed from earlier writers
by separating the emotional dimension of engagement from the physical (behavioural) and
cognitive (rational) dimensions and treating it as important in its own right, not simply one of
the three dimensions of engagement. Despite this, the literature since still suggests that there
is limited academic research in the area of ‘emotional engagement’ but a growing practitioner
interest in the concept (CIPD 2011a; CIPD, 2012).
In terms of learning, knowledge and skills acquisition, Dreyfus (2004) found that personal
engagement with the motives (sic. emotional) embedded in activities and in practices
(behaviours) appears to be a distinguishing aspect of knowledge work (rational). These
motives arise in people’s engagement in activities in practice and their affiliation with what
matters in those practices. Alfes et al. (2010) defined employee engagement as “a multifaceted construct, encompassing intellectual engagement (rational), affective engagement
(emotional) and social engagement (behavioural). Heslin (2010: 218) stated that engaged
employees “exhibit persistent motivation, emotional connections to their work and other
people, as well as the vigilance associated with flow.” (Selligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000)
According to the CIPD’s Shaping the Future report (CIPD 2011a), emotional engagement
occurs when:

people really identify with their work and want to do a good job (which is
synonymous with Kahn’s (1990) view of “a person’s ‘preferred self’ and active, full
role performance),

when employees have an emotional investment in the job, the team and/or employer
(emotional attachment)

or identify fully with the employer’s aims or values (rational and emotional identity).
Emotional engagement is more deep-seated than transactional engagement and happens when
people identify positive feelings with their work, they are motivated by the desire to do a
good job and work with valued colleagues (CIPD 2011b). This work therefore identified
emotional engagement as a distinct form of engagement, rather than as one dimension of
overall engagement, unlike some other literature on the topic. Truss et al. (2012) and the
CIPD (2013) defined employee engagement “as being positively present during the
performance of work willingly contributing intellectual effort, experiencing positive emotions
and meaningful connections to others.” This fits in with Alfes et al.’s (2010) earlier
definition around intellectual (rational), affective (emotional) and social (behavioural)
engagement.
Gourlay et al. (2012) in the final CIPD Shaping the Future report identified that
‘transactional engagement’ has been used before in educational research, community studies
and medicine. However, in these contexts it simply means a two-way rather than a one-way
relationship. In education, a major concern is with student engagement and transactional
engagement is described as ‘learners and teachers engage with each other’ (Russell and
Slater 2011). Bowen et al (2010) when writing about community engagement talked about
‘two-way dialogue and collaboration’. In these and other non-work contexts, ‘transactional
engagement’ seems to be about recognising the active participation of all the parties to a
relationship (students and teachers; community members and political leaders or local
government officials). Employees and employers are already in a two-way contractual
‘employment relationship’ where the issue is more about how actively employees participate
or not, which hitherto has been referred to as the ‘psychological contract’ and more recently
employee engagement.
Fleck and Inceoglu (2010) like Kahn (1990), Harter et al.’s (2002), Schaufeli et al. (2002,
2006), Bakker et al. (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), Truss et al. (2006) appear to agree that
when people are positively engaged, they are likely to be attached to their work, they are
more likely to invest more of themselves in their work role. “When engaged people are
attached to their work role, and are absorbed by enacting it, they invest a lot of personal
energy and enthusiasm into performing it and it becomes an important part of their identity.”
Fleck and Inceoglu (2010:35). According to Bakker (2009: 233), “Engaged employees often
experience positive emotions, including happiness, joy, and enthusiasm.” In contrast, when
people are disengaged, they become physically uninvolved in tasks, cognitively unvigilant,
and emotionally disconnected from others in ways that hide what they think and feel, their
creativity, their beliefs and values, and their personal connections to others (Kahn, 1990,
p.702).
When people are disengaged they have little or no emotional attachment to their work role,
do not care about the organizations goals, and are rarely engrossed in their work, more likely
to feel stressed or burned out (Maslach, 1982). In his final discussion, Kahn (1990, p.719)
suggested that his grounded theory approach cuts across a number of different existing
conceptual frameworks to articulate the complexity of influences on people's personal
engagements and disengagements in particular moments of role performances. One
dimension for him is a simultaneous concern with people's emotional reactions to conscious
and unconscious phenomena and the objective properties of jobs, roles, and work contexts.
Here he drew little distinction between the physical, cognitive, and emotional paths along
which people personally engage and disengage. He suggested that it is likely that a hierarchy
relates increasing depths of engagement to the investment of self along physical, then
cognitive, and finally emotional dimensions.
The Role of Management and Leadership in Employee Engagement
More broadly, Macleod and Clarke (2009: 75) cited four enablers of engagement, which have
been redefined under the ‘Engage for Success’ (2013) movement2 as:

Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the
organization, where it’s come from and where it’s going.

Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as
individuals and coach and stretch their people.

There is employee voice throughout the organizations, for reinforcing and challenging
views, between functions and externally, employees are seen as central to the solution.

There is organizational integrity – the values on the wall are reflected in day to day
behaviours. There is no ‘say –do’ gap.
This has led to and builds upon an extensive literature base that suggests ‘employee
engagement’ enables leaders and managers in organizations to engage employees who “have
a sense of personal attachment to their work and organization; they are motivated and able to
give of their best to help it succeed – and from that flows a series of tangible benefits for
organization and individual alike.” (Macleod and Clarke, 2009: 7).
In relation to leadership and how to cultivate employee engagement you have to have,
according to Heslin (2010: 218) “fair and trustworthy leaders who show employees how their
2
Engage for Success is a movement committed to the idea that there is a better way to work, a better way to
enable personal growth, organisational growth and ultimately growth for Britain by releasing more of the
capability and potential of people at work.
work makes a positive difference (Avolio et al. 2004), jobs are designed to provide optimal
levels of autonomy, challenge, and feedback (Saks, 2006) … and a work environment in
which employees are consulted, appreciated, and have a best friend (Harter, 2008).” Saks’
(2006 & 2008) multidimensional approach draws upon social exchange theory, which
according to Sparrow and Balain (2010) sees feelings of loyality, commitment and
discretionary effort as all being forms of social reciprocation by employees to a good
employer, which in their words, “to propose a ‘hearts and minds’ way of thinking about
engagement.” Sparrow and Balain (2010: 286)
Conversely, Macleod and Clarke (2009: 66) identified four broad inhibitors to effective
engagement by an organization’s leadership and management:

Some leaders are not aware of employee engagement. Others do not believe that it is
worth considering, or do not fully understand the concept and the benefits it could have
for their organization.

Others who are interested in the topic do not know how to address the issue.

Even when leaders place great emphasis on the idea of employee engagement, managers
may not share the belief, or may be ill-equipped to implement engagement strategies.
As a result the organizational culture is unable to deliver engagement.

Among those leaders who are concerned with employee engagement, there is great
variability in their views and commitment to it. Often the potential of employee
engagement is underestimated.
The notions of management and leadership are in themselves contested concepts, according
to Carmichael et al. (2011) who take the view that:

“Management is operational, focused on goal achievement, and more directive of those
managed.” Burns (1978) refers to this as being ‘transactional’, whereas…

“Leadership is strategic, focused on vision, and involves a strong element of building
trust and emotional engagement with ‘followers’.” Burns (1978) refers to this as being
‘transformational’,
According to Bakker (2009 cited in Albrecht, 2010) there are at least four reasons why
engaged workers perform better than non-engaged workers:
1. Engaged employees often experience positive emotions, including happiness, joy, and
enthusiasm.
2. Engaged employees experience better health, which means that they can focus all of
their energy and skills on their work.
3. Engaged employees create their own job and personal resources (PsyCap).
4. Engaged employees transfer their engagement to others in their immediate work
environment (Bakker & Xanthopoulou, 2009).
Bakker (2010: 233) suggests that since performance in most organizations is the result of
collaborative effort, “the engagement of one person may transfer to others and indirectly
improve team performance.” Bakker et al. (2006) suggested that if engagement is contagious
and spreads across work teams, leaders have a significant role in fostering work engagement
among their followers. In Bakker’s view considerate leadership, and more particularly
transformational leadership is successful in accomplishing this, which is a view echoed by
Sparrow & Balain (2010: 294) around supportive and authentic leadership. Other research
suggests that transformational leaders are key social resources for the development of
employee engagement (Tims et al. 2011; Tuckey et al., 2011). A linked outcome to this is
that organizations might consider training employees with a focus on building personal
resources or psychological capital (for example, efficacy beliefs, optimism, hope and
resilience), particularly amongst leaders to increase work engagement.
However, in Shuck and Mogan Herd’s (2012) article, they explore the connection between
traditional and emerging leadership theories, the motivational-state variable of employee
engagement and emotional intelligence, building toward the conceptual model framework
(Figure 3) below. Shuck and Mogan Herd (2012) attempt to argue that there is a conceptual
link between meeting and understanding employee needs, the use of emotional intelligence as
a leadership competency and transformational / transactional leadership.
Figure 3 – Shuck and Mogan Herd’s (2012)
Conceptual Model of Leadership and Employee Engagement
Combining this with Carmichael et al.’s (2011: 2) view that Leadership and Management
Development (L&MD) involves the development of individuals and of organizational
capacity in respect of three dimensions – “the strategic/operational (rational and
transactional), the visioning/goal achievement (behavioural and transformational), and the
trust/direction (affective and emotional engagement) elements.” there is potentially a link
with emotions, learning and performance at work. This has led the author of this paper to
construct an initial conceptual model (Figure 4) that builds upon Shuck and Mogan Herd’s
(2012) work and his working definition of employee engagement “as an employee's positive
emotional attachment to their job and/or colleagues and/or organization which profoundly
influences their willingness to learn and perform at work.” (Dean Horsman, 2012), through
the following themes that are arising:
Figure 4: Conceptual Model of Leadership & Management Development and Employee
Engagement
Source: Horsman, D. (2013) Document 2, DBA study, Leeds, Leeds Beckett University.
Summary of Findings
There is much academic debate about what engagement is, what it looks like, how it is
defined and how organisations can harness it in terms of individual, team and ultimately
improved organisational performance (Christian et al., 2011; Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes,
2002; Saks, 2006). Despite differing perspectives, models and frameworks on which to base
future work around employee engagement, which is becoming a more established concept;
the application of the construct is beleaguered by multiple definitions. The consistent
element in all of the definitions apart from Maslach et al.’s (1997) burnout-antithesis
approach is that of ‘positive’ engagement and employee engagement being a psychological
affective-motivational state (Fleck and Inceoglu, 2010). In line with Kahn’s (1990)
definition, Truss et al. (2006) define employee engagement as "being positively present
during the performance of work by willingly contributing intellectual effort (cognitive),
experiencing positive emotions (affective) and meaningful connections to others (social
behaviour)."
Sparrow & Balain (2010) referred to four individual ‘bonds’ (Pierce et al. 2001) that need to
be established in order to develop the right social climate for employee engagement. They
argue that such ‘bonds’ should be included in definitions and measures of engagement and in
practical terms, to reverse engineer performance. This in essence draws upon the notion of
‘social capital’, which led the author of this paper to ask, is there a link between a person’s
emotions, feelings (affect), their intelligence, and ultimately their attitudes and behavior that
can be embraced positively by an organization in the form of emotional engagement?
As an alternative to studying the whole debateable concept of employee engagement, the
author of this paper has relied upon the work of Kahn (1990) to investigate the distinction
between the physical, cognitive, and in particular the emotional paths along which people
personally engage and disengage. The purpose of the paper was, therefore, to focus more on
the emotional meaning, sensemaking and learning that employees have about work from a
socially constructed perspective (Griffiths and Scarantino, 1997) including the roles of
manager/leader, the team(s), and organisation that they work for and the impact that this has
on their ‘emotional engagement’.
Although Kahn did not actually use the term ‘emotional engagement’, he identified ‘personal
engagement’ as having three dimensions – cognitive (rational), affective (emotional) and
physical (behavioural). The phrase ‘emotional engagement’ appears to have been introduced
by Fleming et al (2005), who wrote about the ‘emotional engagement’ of customers and
employees with the organization, linking this with satisfaction and to desirable financial and
operational outcomes (i.e. performance). Fleming et al (2005) departed from earlier writers
by separating the emotional dimension of engagement from the physical and cognitive
dimensions and treating it as important in its own right, not simply one of the three
dimensions of engagement. Heslin (2010: 218) stated that engaged employees “exhibit
persistent motivation, emotional connections to their work and other people, as well as the
vigilance associated with flow.” Alfes et al. (2010) defined employee engagement as “a
multi-faceted construct, encompassing intellectual engagement (rational), affective
engagement (emotional) and social engagement (physical and behavioural).
The literature, however, suggests that there is limited academic research in the area of
‘emotional engagement’ but a growing practitioner interest in the concept (CIPD 2011a;
Truss et al., 2012). Building upon earlier definitions cited above, Truss et al. (2012) and the
CIPD (2013) defined employee engagement “as being positively present during the
performance of work willingly contributing intellectual effort (rational), experiencing
positive emotions (emotional) and meaningful connections to others (social engagement).”
This recent interest in the role of emotions and affect at work has highlighted that how people
feel about themselves, about their work, and others around them may also be important to
their work performance (Cartwright and Holmes, 2006). The social dimension to work,
where people who are seeking meaning in life also want meaning at work, particularly within
a team(s) should in theory lead to people wanting to feel passionate and energised at work but
there is strong evidence to the contrary.
In terms of learning, knowledge and skills acquisition, Dreyfus (2004) found that personal
engagement with the motives (emotional) embedded in activities and in practices
(behaviours) appears to be a distinguishing aspect of knowledge work (rational). Dreyfus’s
(2004) views on employee engagement in a knowledge-based global economy seem to
suggest that people’s personal and social engagement with colleagues, teams, networks,
organizations, communities and wider society (social capital) appears to be the differentiating
factor. This led the author to ask the question: so what can an organisation do to embrace
employee engagement and more particularly ‘emotional engagement’? With reference to
HRD, Shuck and Mogan Herd (2012) explored the connection between traditional and
emerging leadership theories, the motivational-state variable of employee engagement and
emotional intelligence, arguing that there is a conceptual link between meeting and
understanding employee needs, the use of emotional intelligence as a leadership competency
and transformational / transactional leadership.
Combining Shuck and Mogan Herd’s (2012) model with Carmichael et al.’s (2011: 2) view
that Leadership and Management Development (L&MD) involves the development of
individuals and of organizational capacity in respect of three dimensions – “the
strategic/operational (rational and transactional), the visioning/goal achievement
(behavioural and transformational), and the trust/direction (affective and emotional
engagement) elements.” there is potentially a link with emotions, learning and performance at
work. This has led the author of this paper to construct an initial conceptual model (Figure 4)
that builds upon Shuck and Mogan Herd’s (2012) work and his own working definition of
employee engagement “as an employee's positive emotional attachment to their job and/or
colleagues and/or organization which profoundly influences their willingness to learn and
perform at work.”
Implications for Practice
The paper has explored if there is a link between employees and their manager/leader’s
emotional engagement, intelligence and development through learning that may be linked to
organizational performance; initially through a review of the literature. The paper goes on to
suggest that because emotions are dependent on and activated by social relationships, the
social climate and social dimensions of work ought to be given greater acknowledgement.
Conclusion
This and the other theories and concepts explored within this paper have real implications
within the workplace, particularly around organisational strategy and culture; how employees
are managed and led; learning and development of managers and leaders and of how to
manage and work with the emotions of each and every individual employee. According to
Cartwright and Holmes (2006, p.206) “As individuals become increasingly disenchanted and
disillusioned with work and fatigued by the constant demand to change and to be flexible in
response to organisational needs, employers now need to actively restore the balance,
recognise the meaning and emotional aspects of work and move towards creating a more
energized, fulfilled and engaged workforce.”
The purpose of the paper was to focus more on the meaning and sensemaking that employees
have about work in relation to their manager/leader, their team(s), and organisation that they
work for and the impact that this has on their ‘emotional engagement’. Through a review of
the literature, the author has determined that there appears to be some links between a
manager/leader’s emotional engagement, intelligence and development that may possibly be
linked to individual, team and organizational performance.
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