Employee Engagement as Administrative Reform: Testing the Efficacy of the OPM's Employee Engagement Initiative

Researchers have long recognized administrative reform as a constant feature of American public administration. The employee engagement initiative of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has become one of the most prominent administrative reforms underway in the federal government. Like many reforms, the veracity of claims about this reform have gone untested. This article addresses this gap by testing the relationship between the OPM's employee engagement initiative and agency performance. After establishing the psychometric validity of the OPM's Employment Engagement Index, the authors use a five-year panel data set of federal agencies and two-way fixed-effects regression to test the efficacy of this prominent reform. The analysis shows that efforts to encourage employee engagement generally have the expected relationship with performance, but the relationship varies according to the components that make up the index and the organizational level at which these efforts are expended.