Identified Research Gaps in Employee Engagement

Abstract

This research paper sets out to investigate the research gaps in employee engagement for systematic empirical investigations, in order to substantiate future studies. A desk research has contributed to identify seven gaps in employee engagement. The first gap which is about the conceptual confusion, can be minimized by formulating a working definition of employee engagement. The nonexistence of theoretical arguments and empirical tests on the impact of the religiosity on employee engagement, in both the Sri Lankan and in the international contexts, has been identified as the second gap. The third gap has been identified to be the fact that the rapport between personal character and employee engagement being, neither theoretically argued nor empirically tested, in Sri Lankan and the international contexts. The fourth gap is the unavailability of studies in the Sri Lankan context as to how the high performance work practices (HPWPs) impact on employee engagement. The fifth gap identified is the shortage of empirical evidence regarding the link between employee engagement and organizational financial performance in the Sri Lankan context. Absence of empirical evidence on employee job performance to be an intervening variable for employee engagement and organizational financial performance is brought up as the sixth gap. The same absence is found in empirical evidence about religiosity, HPWPs, personal character, leadership and work life balance that significantly affect employee engagement in a nomological network in the Sri Lankan context as well as in the international context, which is the seventh Gap.