Work engagement in Europe: Relations with national economy, governance and culture

This paper is the first to analyze differences in work engagement across countries using a well-validated measure and representative samples from thirty-five European countries. Rather than individual levels of work engagement, mean levels of work engagement of the country's workforce are analyzed. So far, only international consultancy firms performed such national comparisons. However, these comparisons are either based on proprietary measures of engagement with unknown reliability and validity or on non-representative national samples, and mostly on both. Yet there is a great need for such cross-national comparisons since employee engagement is a priority in many internationally operating businesses. A deeper insight into cross-national differences in work engagement is therefore conducive for establishing and evaluating corporate engagement policies.