FAIRNESS IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: EFFECT OF EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION AND NATIONAL CULTURE

Zuliawati Mohamed Saad¹*, Suhaimi Sudin^2
1 Ms., College of Business Management & Accounting, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, MALAYSIA, zuliawati@uniten.edu.my
² Mr., College of Graduate Studies, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, MALAYSIA, ssuhaimi@uniten.edu.my
*Corresponding author

Abstract

Employee engagement is an important driver in managing talent in an organization. Engaging employee to performance is a vital human resource function as this behavior lead to higher productivity and contributes to sustainable competitive advantage. Engaged employees are willing to invest effort with high energy and mental resilience, enthusiastic, and fully concentrated and engrossed in work. Many scholars argued that engaged employees are not addicted to their work, they enjoy other things outside work and; unlike workaholics, they do not work hard because of a strong and irresistible inner drive, but because for them working is fun. But most of the employee engagement construct discussed in the literature is frequently contaminated with its identification with other outcome variables such as job involvement, intrinsic motivation, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Some scholars discussed problems associated with employee engagement whether it is an attitude or a behaviour. This paper explores the literature of employee engagement to map the contradictions and similarities of engagement construct and proposed a refined definition and comprehensive construct explanation that could be used to define and measure employee engagement.
On the other hand, performance management system presents valuable performance information to a number of critical human resource activities, such as the allocation of rewards, feedback on the development and assessment of training needs and credentials for legal purposes. But performance management system is tainted with paradoxes and organizational justice problems that intricate dynamic relationship between employee satisfaction and perception of fairness are raised. Scholars in this area argued that fairness in performance management system could be assessed using four categories of justice: distributive, procedural, informational and interpersonal justice. This study proposes that perception of fairness of performance management system will affect employee’s satisfaction level and in turn affect employee engagement.
As engagement drivers are not universal, this study argue that national culture variation will moderates the relationship of organizational justice in performance management and employee engagement. Many organizations operate in the multicultural, multigenerational and cross-geographical world represents new challenges for leaders trying to drive high levels of employee engagement. Organizations that invest in understanding and managing the key drivers of engagement across their multiple constituencies will drive performance in efficient and effective ways. We need to understand how national culture affect relationship of fairness in performance management, employee satisfaction and employee engagement.
This study explores literature of organizational justice in performance management, employee satisfaction and national culture dimensions, and proposes a parsimonious and researchable framework on how these variables relate to employee engagement as dependent variable. This study seeks to understand the linkages between perceived fairness, employee satisfactions and employee engagement, and how national culture moderates this relationship. Better understanding of the perceptions of fairness based on the concepts of distributive justice, procedural justice, interpersonal justice and informational justice of performance management process, and related employee satisfaction and employee engagement, should provide decision makers with more specific information needed to improve the effectiveness of the system in achieving organizational goals.

Keywords: Employee engagement, performance management fairness, employee satisfaction, national culture