Firuzi Shazad Bhathena and Digvijaysinh G. Thakore |
Abstract
Employee engagement continues to command global attention across disciplines of human resource development, organisational psychology, and management practice. Yet despite over three decades of study, the concept remains fragmented, frequently reduced to fashionable corporate rhetoric rather than sustained developmental strategy. This conceptual paper re-examines engagement as a multi-level phenomenon that integrates psychological, behavioural, and contextual dimensions. Drawing from seminal works by Kahn, Maslach, Schaufeli, Saks, Bakker, and subsequent contributions, it critically analyses the theoretical evolution of engagement and highlights the persistence of definitional and methodological ambiguities.
The paper proposes the Tri-Spiral Engagement Framework (TSEF), a dynamic model linking inner psychological conditions, behavioural expressions, and outer contextual enablers through reciprocal feedback loops. This framework positions engagement as a cyclical process of energy investment, performance reinforcement, and meaning reconstruction within organisational life. By situating engagement in the Human Resource Development (HRD) paradigm, the paper argues that sustainable engagement arises not from transient initiatives but from systemic changes in leadership, work design, and learning culture.
The contribution is threefold: first, to clarify conceptual boundaries among overlapping constructs such as job satisfaction, commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviour; second, to integrate competing perspectives within a unified process model; and third, to derive empirically testable propositions for future research. The discussion concludes with implications for HRD practitioners seeking to transform engagement from a survey metric into a lived organisational capability.
Keywords: Contextual enablers, Employee engagement, Human resource development, Organisational behaviour, Tri-spiral engagement framework, Work motivation.
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