On September 3, 2008, Michael Hammer, the co-author of the widely acclaimed 1993 book “Reengineering the Corporation,” died of a brain hemorrhage (Hevesi, September 4, 2008). His book encouraged leaders to simplify how work is accomplished by redesigning processes from scratch, holding nothing sacred from the existing approach. These ideas were incredibly influential, spawning countless business process reengineering projects at Fortune 500 companies. “Reengineering” quickly became the business catchphrase of the mid 1990s, and Hammer was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential people of 1996.
Yet, if you go back and read that 1996 accolade, you find that Hammer lost control of the term that he coined. The article noted that reengineering had become synonymous with downsizing and other unintended forms of reorganization, done in the name of efficiency. Hammer was quoted as saying "It is astonishing to me the extent to which the term re-engineering has been hijacked, misappropriated and misunderstood" (Anonymous, June 17, 1996). Here we are over 12 years later, and I worry that the OD field is about to lose control of another influential idea: Is “employee engagement” about to be hijacked? Compared to the specificity that the term “reengineering” originally had, “engagement” was born at risk.
First, consider the recent scholarly review entitled “The Meaning of Employee Engagement” (Macey & Schneider, 2008). The article required 28 pages in its attempt to accomplish its purpose, noting that both academics and practitioners use ambiguous definitions of engagement. The term sometimes refers to a temporary state such as an emotion, while other times it refers to a stable trait like personality. It is sometimes defined synonymously with employees’ intentions to stay with their employer, while other times it encompasses the employees’ enthusiasm for their employer. Engagement also blurs the line between satisfaction with the job and satisfaction with the employer. If experts in organizational science cannot specify what employee engagement is, how can we be sure of its impact on organizational performance? What happens when organizational leaders, the consumers of our discipline, use our term and quote our research findings?
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