Research Learning Group

Lead Researcher: Theresa M. Welbourne, PhD

This research group for leaders focused on improving employee engagement is a follow up to the Incentive Research Foundation technical report titled: Engaged in what? Creating connections to performance with rewards, recognition and roles. The report documents the history of employee engagement, definitions, research and outcomes of engagement as well as reviewing a case study of the Cleveland Clinic. The unique contribution of this report is the suggestion that role-based behavior provides a lens to connect engagement activities with firm strategy and organizational-level outcomes.

Benefits of Participation

While contributing to the global knowledge base on engagement research, your organization will also receive a roadmap focusing on ways you can take your engagement programs further to better enhance performance outcomes, as well as tools that will give you information for your own benchmarking and learning.

Research Commitment

Project Timeline

Phase 1: Organization Profiling

Mapping engagement, intent, role-based behavior and outcomes

• The researchers will work with participating organizations to develop a profile of each firm, including engagement intent, engagement efforts, links to roles, and the relationship between role-based behavior and outcomes.

Phase 2: gathering New Evidence

Surveys with managers of the participating firms

• We will help the participating companies by providing them with roadmaps focusing on ways they can take their engagement programs further to better enhance performance outcomes.
• (Depending on level of customization, additional fees may apply.) For those firms interested, we have supplemental tools that could be used as part of the research. Managers can do assessments of employees using the role-based performance scale (this takes about 3 minutes per employee). Also, for managers, we can use the 3-minute 360, which also focuses on role-based performance. All of these additional tools provide further diagnostic data for the research team, and in addition, it gives the participating company more information for their own benchmarking and learning.

Through the research institutions and participating group members, we will develop a global research to meet the needs of the complex organizations interested in this work. Our goal is to work together to make employee engagement work more meaningful to today’s businesses and employees.