Korean Journal of Policy Studies
Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University
Article

Factors Influencing Public Employee Engagement and Its Impact on Organizational Performance*

Chulwoo Kim1
1Chulwoo Kim has a PhD in public administration from the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Korea Institute of Public Administration. His research interests include organizational behavior, organizational management, performance management, human resource management, and research methods. E-mail: cwkim@kipa.re.kr.

© Copyright 2011 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Oct 24, 2011; Revised: Oct 26, 2011; Revised: Dec 09, 2011; Accepted: Dec 15, 2011

Published Online: Dec 31, 2011

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors influencing employee engagement and its possible outcomes. Using data from a large-scale survey of employees in 72 US federal government agencies, and several organizational factors in public setting as control variables, the study empirically tested three contextual factors (participative leadership support, organizational fairness, and supportiveness of organizational context) that influence employee engagement in federal agencies. The study also examined the mediating role of employee engagement between the three contextual variables and organizational performance. The results indicate that participative leadership support and supportiveness of organizational context predict employee engagement. In addition, employee engagement mediated the relationship between antecedents and organizational performance.

Keywords: employee engagement; organizational performance; US federal agencies