Employee engagement in East Asia

Since the seminal work by Kahn (1990) and Schaufeli and his colleagues (2002), there has been a proliferation of employee engagement research over the past few decades, with several dedicated special issues on this topic. However, the concept of employee engagement and its measurements were derived primarily from the West (particularly in North America), which often failed to grasp how employee engagement is understood, conceptualized, and made an impact in the Eastern countries. The authors thus provide a systematic and comprehensive review of 85 articles conducted in the Eastern countries on employee engagement over the last decade (2011-21). Their review extends its field in different ways: (a) by providing a conceptual clarity of employee engagement in the East and offering some insights and future research into its research, (b) by examining the existing measurements and methodological approaches, and (c) mapping out the nomological network and impact of employee engagement in East Asia. Our review depicts a holistic picture of where employee engagement research in East Asia has been and where it should go in the future.