Over two decades have passed since William Kahn formally defined employee engagement as ‘the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances’ (Kahn, 1990: 694). Since that time we have witnessed an explosion of scholarly and practitioner interest in engagement – particularly in the last ten years. Engagement has recently been the focus of several narrative reviews (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008; Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, and Taris, 2008; Britt, Dickinson, Greene-Shortridge, and McKibben, 2007; Macey and Schneider, 2008; Schaufeli and Salanova, 2007), two books in addition to this current volume (Bakker and Leiter, 2010; Macey, Schneider, Barbera, and Young, 2009), three meta-analyses (Christian, Garza, and Slaughter, 2011; Cole, Walter, Bedeian, and O’Boyle, 2012; Crawford, LePine, and Rich, 2010), and special issues of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2008, March), Work and Stress (2008, July-September), and the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (2011, January).
