Some Antecedents of Employee Engagement of Japanese Companies
Abstract
Corporate human resource managers and institutional investors place a high value on employee engagement (EE) in Japanese companies and demand proactive disclosure of this information as human capital information (HCI). Currently, this demand for disclosure has been growing stronger in Europe and the United States. Therefore, Western HR consulting firms are providing services to Japanese companies with suggestions for improving EE. It is unclear whether this service is suitable because of the differences in employment systems between Western countries and Japan. However, EE should be appropriately enhanced in Japanese companies. This paper uses an employee survey of Japanese companies to identify EE antecedents. A multiple-indicator model was created by analyzing the covariance structure of the survey results. Four factors were extracted from this analysis. Two antecedents, “Empowerment” and “Loyalty,” were identified as constituting “Engagement.” This result is generally consistent with the “job engagement” results of Saks’ study. This consistency indicates that our research results are adequate. In the future, we will also investigate organizational engagement, which is missing in our findings, and identify more EE antecedents.
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