Need an research paper on the crucial importance of employee engagement. Needs to be 9 pages. Please no plagiarism. Better individual employee involvement is perceived as a pre-requisite for improved engagement. Hence strategies that link improved performance with individual benefits such as increased pay, or bonus, better working conditions, etc., results in generating higher individual productivity (Storey, Wright, Ulrich, 2009: p. 116).

However, regardless of its immense potential, the concept of employee engagement continues to be elusive (Gibson, 2006. Harter et al., 2002. Macey & Schneider, 2008).

Employee engagement is known to generate positive outcomes including increased productivity, improved performance, safer and healthier employees, reduced absenteeism, as well as increased employee retention (Fleming & Asplund, 2007. Wagner & Harter, 2006). However regardless of the positive impact of employee engagement merely 30 percent of the total workforce worldwide was estimated to be investing in the concept (Harter et al., 2002. Saks, 2006. Wagner & Harter, 2006). Furthermore, studies have also indicated that more than 60 percent of the world’s total workforce is emotionally less involved in their respective jobs indicating low levels of employee engagement (Shuck & Wollard, 2008). Such a wide disparity between the need for employee engagement and lack of efforts on the part of the management to ensure increased employee involvement has resulted in immense losses to the U.S. economy amounting to $ 300 billion dollars annually (Fornes, Rocco, and Wollard, 2008). Evidence suggests that despite the rising popularity of the concept of employee engagement within the field of management it continues its downward spiral (Shuck & Wollard, 2008). However, employees across the globe continue to rate employee engagement higher than any other element needed for organizational development and success (Ketter, 2008).

The drastic changes that have taken place in the global market space and the sudden rise in competition, managing change has become one of the most crucial aspects of organizations. However such change management cannot be simply achieved through conventional strategies such as training the employees and preparing them to address work-related challenges.