EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN THE AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY OF MALAYSIA DURING EMCO

Abstract

Employee engagement has been recognized as a prerequisite for business success because it can increase employee satisfaction, reduce employee turnover, and enhance employee commitment. It is a dominant and desirable factor influencing the productivity and profitability. As a result, keeping employees engaged has become one of the organizations’ primary goals in order to promote retention and commitment. The core objective of the proposed study is to investigate the relationship between the factors of workplace autonomy, participative leadership, and career development with employee engagement in the agriculture industry of Malaysia. Previous research has not taken into account a holistic model of employee engagement from the perspective addressed in this paper, specifically from the context of the agricultural industry. This study adds to the body of knowledge on employee engagement by determining the statistical relevance of the conceptual framework that can provide organizations with insights into the factors that influence employee engagement. This descriptive quantitative study used a cross-sectional data collection method, with a questionnaire survey distributed to the target population of respondents via online mode. SPSS software analysis tools were used to examine hypotheses and perform a series of analyses to obtain appropriate statistical results. The analysis, found that participative leadership has the strongest relationship with employee engagement, followed by workplace autonomy and career development. The findings provided impetus for organizations to encourage participative leadership in order to enhance employee engagement, particularly in Asia, where many line or performance managers are still traditional in their leadership and management and are less participative. Another recommendation is to give employees more autonomy in order to motivate them to improve their performance and commitment. In terms of career development, the findings were consistent with previous studies both globally and within Malaysia. Future research could focus on other factors that influence employee engagement that were not studied in this paper to provide more insights for employers in Malaysia’s agriculture industry from various perspectives.