Impact of Internal Communication on Employee Engagement: An Empirical Investigation of Operational Level Employees in the Apparel Industry

Abstract

Employee engagement is an important phenomenon in present human resource management concepts which emphasis that engaged employees in the organization are rather involved in their work effectively and efficiently. Most of the organizations today has identified importance of labor force when achieving their organizational goals. Therefore employee engagement is also an influential factor that an organization should concern since it has contiguous impact on employee turnover, absenteeism as well as productivity or outcome of employees. There are many constituents which influence engagement of employees out of which this research has focused on the relationship between internal communication and employee engagement since there has only been a of researches concentrated solely on the mentioned subjects in Sri Lankan context. Researcher has selected lower level employees involved in apparel industry as population for the research out of which researcher has taken 100 employees as sample. A questionnaire was distributed among them for the survey which enabled researcher to identify dimensions to measure internal communication and employee engagement while referring to the past written history and discussions with employees. Accordingly researcher has developed hypothesis such as there is a significant relationship between internal communication and employee engagement and there is a significant impact of internal communication on employee engagement. Researcher conducted correlation analysis, regression analysis and descriptive statistics in order to testing the hypothesis. There revealed that there were positive moderate statistically significant relationships with internal communication and employee engagement. Therefore both alternative hypothesis were accepted under 5% confidence level. In conclusion, it could be highlighted the importance of internal communication strategy to the organizations. Specially for engaging lower level employees in apparel industry.