Factors Affecting Employee Engagement Based on an Employee Attitude Survey in Japan

Abstract

Japanese companies are beginning to recognize the importance of employee engagement. However, many companies have not been able to leverage employee engagement to increase their corporate value. This is possibly because it is difficult to determine and utilize the factors affecting employee engagement. To clarify the relationship between engagement and its influencing factors, we constructed a multiple indicator model and performed a covariance structure analysis. Data for the analyses were obtained from the 2019 "Survey on Work Styles and the Current Conditions Related to Labor Shortage," conducted by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training. We then extracted four factors to create an "engagement model". The study identified two factors that influence engagement: empowerment and loyalty. The results can be used to inform policies on improving employee engagement by leveraging these factors.

Some Antecedents of Employee Engagement of Japanese Companies

“…The GFI and AGFI, which are indicators of the explanatory power of the model, show high values of 0.87 and 0.84, respectively, indicating a good fit for the model. RMSEA, a measure of model deviation, is 0.09, which is not sufficiently low to reject the results [15]. "Loyalty" has the greatest prescriptive power for engagement with a standardized coefficient of 0.51.…”

“…RMSEA measures the degree of deviation between the model and true distribution. We used SPSS statistics 24.0 and Amos 28.0 to perform these analyses [15].…”

“…The fourth factor, "workload," includes items that express the physical workload, such as "stress and fatigue," "busyness," and "work concentration," as well as mental workload, such as "obligation" and "guilty." These four factors cumulatively explained 42.9% of the variance [15].…”

“…Thereafter, we extracted 4 factors by drawing a scree plot (Figure 2) with eigenvalues greater than 1. Furthermore, it is reasonable to adopt four factors based on inflection points [15]. 3 shows the factor analysis results of Q27, "Please describe your perception of your current main job (at the time of the survey, excluding side jobs)" [6].…”

“…Therefore, it may have some overlap, for example, between job and organization, with the definition of engagement, which can be considered one of the reasons for its high level of influence. However, in this instance, loyalty refers to employees' attachment toward their company and that between the employees of the upper and lower levels, rather than those in an equal relationship [15].…”