Measuring employee engagement in a South African poultry producer

Abstract

Employee engagement in the workplace can be beneficial towards an organisation. Most of the scales measuring employee engagement were found not to be suitable for the South African context. Recently, researchers developed a scale measuring employee engagement in a diverse South African context, and on multiple levels such as organisational and individual levels. This study tested this newly developed instrument for initial reliability and validity in a poultry producer. The original instrument was pre-tested and after minor amendments used to collect data through an electronic web-based questionnaire from employees in the selected organisation. The selected organisation reflected the profile of typical South African employees. Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to determine the factorial structure and Cronbach Alpha was used to establish the internal reliability of the instrument scale. The instrument tested reliable and valid for the poultry producer. Further analyses of the data were done to determine significant differences between various biographical groups within the selected organisation. The measurement instrument was designed to test engagement on the organisational level, team level and the individual level which was confirmed in the survey result analysis.