Impact of the Factors of Employee Engagement on Job Performance: Study in Tourism & Hotel Management Sector, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Employee Engagement is a concept gaining significant importance and Organizations today use engaged employees as a tool for strategic partner in the business. The concept of employee engagement has now gained even more importance, since many drivers have been identified, which affects employee performance and well-being at workplace. As companies across industries strive to survive and rise through tough competition today, physical and mental well- being of employees will be one of the important aspects that HR managers need to tend focus on since it mainly affects their engagement and performance levels as well. The study explores the concept of employee engagement and also throws light on certain dimensions of employee engagement by analyzing specifically four divers, namely Salary and Compensation, Working Conditions, communication and Training and Development. . Special focus and effort is required specifically on the factors in the working environment and team and co-worker relationship as they have shown significantly higher impact on employee engagement and hence employee performance. The purpose of this study is to find out the influential factors of employee engagement and their effect on employee's performance in the Tourism and Hotel sector in Sri Lanka. Problem: the researcher found out that the employee absenteeism rate was high, the profit rates were low and production and training of employees to work in the industry was low considering the data of the past five years Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative (questionnaire survey) research approach is used in this study focusing on the factors of employee engagement and its effect on employee performance. For the sample selection, convenience sampling was used. Data collected were analyzed using SPSS and found that there is a strong relationship between with certain independent variables with employee performance Findings: The findings of this research show that all the factors examined were the determinant factors of employee engagement that have the influence on employee performance. Employee engagement has significant impact on employee performance. Research limitations/implications: Due to the time and budget constraint, this research was conducted only in one state of Sri Lanka. In terms of job profession, the researcher only made the survey to be distributed among a selected sample in an institution in the Tourism and Hotel Sector .Practical implications: This study will help in suggesting solutions and benefits to the organizations to engage more employees and also to improve their productivity. Thus, it is very important to focus on these variables in order to identify their influence on employee performance in Sri Lanka context. Originality/value: This study will give a new guideline on the effect of employee engagement on employee performance and may help in contributing to the future research because of the limited literature.