Vital role of leader as employee value proposition for employee engagement in Thai perspective

Abstract

Today talent scarcity is a big issue. It would be even worse if a company failed to engage their staff to work for the long run and not to resign from the job and work for competitors. As a result of failing to do so, a company may face many hidden costs through resignation of high potential employees. Employee Engagement is then regarded globally as a vital tool to retain staff. Surprisingly, there is little research on such, especially in Thailand. From a business perspective, top management needs to find a new way to engage staff to stay and contribute best effort for a company’s success. The objectives of this research were (1) To define employee value proposition in Thai context in engaging employees to work at the same company in the long run (2) To suggest engaging ways of work for the executives of Thai firm to effectively engage and retain their employees. This paper explored the role of leader as vital employee value proposition for employee engagement among Thai workforce at 4 leading Thai companies; namely PTT Public Company Limited (PTT), The Siam Cement Public Company Limited (SCG), Toyota Motor Thailand Company Limited and Charoen Pokphand Group (CP). These 4 companies are among Thailand’s leading companies that Thai people would like to work with the most according to research by Manpower in 1994. Their turnover rates including financial performances have proved that their employee engagement initiatives have worked well since the turnover rate dropped year on year, whereas their financial performances were strong. The survey data were collected from a sample of 400 employees (100 employees from each firm). It was found that the leader has positive reinforcement for employee engagement by being vital employee value proposition. The less the gap between top boss and employees is, the more engaged employees would be as they thought their voice would be heard.