International Perspectives on Employee Engagement

Employee engagement, or more specifically how to obtain more engagement and what to do with the disengaged, preoccupies C-level executives, human resources professionals, and consultants. Factiva, a global database of more than 33,000 national and international publications indexed by Dow Jones, registered a near-continuous double-digit growth in interest in the topic since 1994. COVID-19 appears to be straining work systems, and employee engagement may be suffering.

Interestingly, the American preoccupation with employee engagement, as evidenced by the tens of thousands press mentions indexed by Factiva and the over 38,000 website hits for the search term "employee engagement tools", does not appear shared by the rest of the world.

International Perspectives on Employee Engagement offers a predominately non-American view of employee engagement. The authors address employee engagement from a variety of perspectives. They represent both empirical research and theoretical discussions. The chapters have a distinctly international viewpoint with authors hailing from Europe, Middle East, Africa, and North America. Given the cultural diversity of the authors, this book offers a unique, non-American perspective on employee engagement.

With a new introduction that specifically examines the possible key performance indicators (KPIs) for the annual executive performance appraisal process resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Studies of Management & Organization.

Michael Segalla is Professor of Management at HEC Paris, France. He is Franco-American and has taught at McGill University and City University of New York, and was appointed Visiting Chair Professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. His research focuses on cross-cultural risk analysis.