ABSTRACT
Academic scholars are endeavoring to provide us with theories and operational definitions on the nature and causes of employee engagement. They form and test theories in an attempt to validate or disprove causal relationships. Their work must be objective and robust to meet criteria for rigor, keep them on tenure tracks, and qualify their work for publication in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Academic purity, however, has trade-offs. Scholarly pursuits can become increasingly narrow from a disciplinary point of view, therefore losing the relevance necessary for practical solutions to complex real-world problems.
Practitioners, on the other hand, seek formulaic solutions that are directly relevant and implementable, even if they may lack conceptual rigor. They use mental models and rules of thumb and are comfortable with experiential sources such as case studies or intuitively derived principles. They do not typically elaborate on or examine subtle nuances and tend to supplement whatever evidence they have with their intuition and experience.
