Employee engagement in multinational organizations

Recent years have seen spiralling interest in employee engagement in many economies across the world, from employers, policy organizations and governments. Governments have seen high levels of employee engagement as a means to improve the performance of firms and thereby increase the competitiveness of their national economy.1 Many employers have developed mechanisms to monitor engagement levels amongst their workforce and have tried to develop policies and practices to foster high levels of employee engagement. Multinational corporations (MNCs), considering employee engagement across their operations, are faced, however, with a more general question of whether employee engagement is a universal concept, similar throughout the world, or whether its meaning and the factors that influence it differ in the different parts of the world in which they operate. As discussed in Chapter 9, cross-national and cross-cultural research would suggest different attitudes to work and different behavioural responses by employees in different parts of the world. Thus, MNCs are faced with the question of whether employee engagement can be measured and compared in a meaningful way across a multinational organization’s operations, and whether similar policies and practices are likely to influence levels of engagement similarly in different national contexts.