Human resource management practices and employee engagement.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Employee engagement has emerged as a critical factor for organizations seeking to enhance productivity, foster employee well-being, and gain a competitive advantage. Human resource management practices are vital to driving employee engagement. Therefore, based on the social exchange theory, the current study explores the interaction between human resource management practices and employee engagement. and evaluates the level of engagement (i.e., High, medium, low) of employees. Also, finds an association between engagement levels and the age group of employees. METHODS: The study administered the standardized questionnaire to employees (n= 187) working in information technology companies. A purposive random sampling research design was adopted for data collection. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to ensure the validity of the adapted questionnaire, then simple linear regression was run in AMOS v24 software for finding the variance between human resource management practices and employee engagement. Further, chi-square and analysis of variance tests were also used in SPSS v22. FINDINGS: Human Resource Management practices such as recruiting and selection, continuous training and development opportunities, competitive rewards, career advancement, and employee involvement together explained 33 percent variance based on the coefficient of determination (R2) value, where (Beta= 0.57, p<0.001). Also found 30 employees fell in the low engaged category, 96 were in moderately engaged, 61 lay in the high engaged category, where 75 employees out of 96 (moderately engaged employee category) lay in the 20-30 age group and 31 out of 61 (high engaged employee's category) belonged to the 30-40 age group. The novelty of this study is to examine the influence of human resource management practices by taking factors such as rigorous hiring, continuous training, career advancement, competitive rewards, and employee involvement on employee engagement, particularly in the information technology industry. CONCLUSION: This study highlights the necessity for Human resource management practices to take a proactive, holistic approach to ensure congruence with corporate objectives and emphasize engagement. It also underlines the vitality of ongoing human resource management practice monitoring and growth to maintain and boost employee engagement. The study further discusses the strategies which must be adopted for enhancing the engagement level of low-engaged employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]