Reconceptualizing employee engagement: toward a relational, existential alternative

Employee engagement has become one of the most influential constructs in organizational scholarship, yet its centrality has rarely been matched by conceptual scrutiny. This article examines employee engagement through three converging issues: a largely unexamined presumption that engagement is inherently good, a definitional ambiguity produced by persistent jingle-jangle phenomena and by a growing gap between what engagement measures claim to capture and what they actually measure, and a boundaryless expansion sustained by an alliance with managerialist discourse. Building on this diagnosis, the article proposes a transformative reconceptualization that integrates Sartrean existential choice with Bourdieusian field-habitus theory, repositioning employee engagement from a manageable psychological state to an active, relational practice of existential self-definition within organizational fields. Three propositions specify how this reconceptualization redirects research design toward field position, capital, and habitus rather than measurable psychological states, and an illustrative application shows how apparently identical engagement scores can reflect differently structured existential and relational conditions. The article closes by situating this diagnostic pattern within the broader literature on dominant, ambiguous, and expansive organizational concepts, and by outlining the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of treating engagement as a relational practice rather than a manageable psychological state.