Driving employee engagement across sectors: current evidence and an agenda for future research

Employee engagement has emerged as a critical employee attitude linked to employee motivation and organisational performance and has successfully embedded itself in governments around the world. Apart from a few exceptions, however, much of what we know about engagement does not attend to the institutional context of public institutions and whether private-sector theories and approaches to driving employee engagement work well in public sector organisations. To address this gap, we systematically review the evidence on antecedents of employee engagement, and determine whether and how sectoral differences may matter. We then discuss the findings and contextualise the debate surrounding the employee engagement construct. The paper ends by proposing an institutionally grounded model of employee engagement that proposes public values, professionalism, and political insulation as key macro-level drivers of employee engagement.