Relevance of employee engagement across cultures from the perspective of HR professional associations

Most research on work engagement has been conducted in either North America or Western Europe. This is not surprising given that the two mainstay theoretical models were developed by William Kahn (1990) in the United States (see Chapter 4) and William Schaufeli and Arnold Bakker (2006) (see Chapters 1 and 7, respectively) from Europe. There is little research that examines whether engagement is considered a relevant construct in other parts of the world (cf. Bakker et al., 2011; Shimazu et al., 2008; Wajid et al., 2011).