What Do We Really Know About Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement has become one of the most popular topics in management. In less than 10 years, there have been dozens of studies published on employee engagement as well as several meta‐analyses. However, there continue to be concerns about the meaning, measurement, and theory of employee engagement. In this article, we review these concerns as well as research in an attempt to determine what we have learned about employee engagement. We then offer a theory of employee engagement that reconciles and integrates Kahn's ( ) theory of engagement and the Job Demands–Resources ( JD ‐R) model (Bakker & Demerouti, ). We conclude that there continues to be a lack of consensus on the meaning of employee…