An interesting article in December '11 issue of the Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology - Muller, K, Voelke, M.C., & Hattrup, K. (2011) On the relationship between job satisfaction and non-response in employee attitude surveys: A longitudinal field study. What makes this study particularly interesting is that it was based over 4 years in business setting, so about as real as you can get. Although employee engagement is an increasingly popular activity in organisations there are problems with definition of 'engagement' and of measurement. One such difficulty is non-response. If the non-responders are not a random sample then it is likely that the results of the survey will be biased in some way. (For example, if all the employees who were dissatisfied with the company chose not to respond, the results of the survey might give an over-optimistic view of the current state of morale of the workforce).
Muller et al.'s study showed that employees who did not respond to the first survey were also less likely to respond to subsequent surveys. Likewise, job satisfaction aslo was a good predictor of response, with those employees reporting high job satisfaction more likely to respond to survey requests. Another important factor that influenced response rate was the level of satisfaction that the employee expressed regarding his/her supervisor and the authors highlight the importance of the supervisor's role in the success of employee engagement interventions, including the communication of information before and after the survey has been conducted.
The obvious implication of measuring employee engagement is that the organisation's leaders will want to act on the results, but in order to take appropriate action they need to be able to trust the data. This report gives a fascinating insight into how any data need careful interpretation before an action plan is created.
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