In today’s competitive business environment, many organisations are looking for new ways to enhance the productivity and performance of their human resources (Przytuła, Strzelec, & Krysińska-Kościańska, 2020).

Attracting, maintaining and developing an effective workforce is becoming one of the key challenges that these organisations are facing (Diaz-Carrion, López-Fernández, & Romero-Fernandez, 2021). In particular, after the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)pandemic, many organisations across different business sectors have been eager to learn new ways of enhancing the efficiency and productivity of their operations (Przytuła et al., 2020).

One of the main concepts that has been rising in the recent organisational behaviour literature is the concept of ‘employee engagement’ (Sun & Bunchapattanasakda, 2019). This concept is used to describe employees who are eager to play vital roles in enhancing the value creation processes of their organisations (Deeb et al., 2020).

Engaged employees tend to put much effort and time for the purpose of enhancing the productivity and performance of the firms that they are working in (Sun & Bunchapattanasakda, 2019). For these reasons, it is critical for organisations to search for new ways to make employee engaged in the workplace.

The extant literature proposes three dimensions of employee engagement. For instance, Shuck, Adelson and Reio (2017) argued that the concept of ‘employee engagement’ is used to describe employees who are cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally engaged in the workplace. Cognitive engagement (CE) refers to the degree to which employees are focused on their tasks, where they are mentally immersed and absorbed in performing their expected tasks (Joo, Zigarmi, Nimon, & Shuck, 2017). On the other hand, emotional engagement (EE) refers to the degree of affection and devotion that employees have towards their tasks and organisations (Reina, Rogers, Peterson, Byron, & Hom, 2018). Finally, the behavioural dimension refers to a group of actions that can be seen in employees’ commitment to their tasks and their exertion of the highest effort possible for the benefit of their organisations (Shuck et al., 2017).

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and the three dimensions of employee engagement. The article focuses on five main HRM practices, which are the selection and hiring processes, training and development, job design, job security, and rewards and payment systems (Barrick, Thurgood, Smith, & Courtright, 2015). This is considered important because the extant literature shows some shortcomings regarding the antecedents of employee engagement (Saks, 2019). Thus, our article fills this important research gap where there is scarcity of research that examines the impact of HRM practices on employee engagement, especially in developing countries like Egypt (Soliman & Wahba, 2019). This article examines the five HRM practices for their key role in organisational success. For instance, selection and hiring processes represent an important stage for choosing the best workers who fit into the organisation and to the required tasks (Przytuła et al., 2020). On the other hand, training and development is essential to keep the task force equipped with the latest skills and knowledge required to perform their jobs (Karim, Choudhury, & Latif, 2019). Additionally, the job design plays an important role in inspiring employees and decreasing turnover rates (Oldham & Fried, 2016). Moreover, job security is essential for giving employees feelings of stability, which in turn will have a positive impact on their willingness to stay at their jobs (Reina et al., 2018). Job security is becoming very important for employees especially after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, where many companies started aggressive layoff strategies for the purpose of cost reduction (Restubog, Ocampo, & Wang, 2020).

Finally, the last HRM practice involves an effective reward and payment system which is considered one of the main factors that enhance employees’ satisfaction and commitment (Aust, Matthews, & Muller-Camen, 2020). By examining the impact of these five HRM practices on employee engagement, the present article can provide important guidelines for practitioners to follow to enhance the level of engagement of their workforce by applying effective HRM practices.

Another purpose of the current study is to examine the role of implementation of the organisational strategy on moderating the relationship between HRM practices and employee engagement. This is considered important because it is critical for all employees to clearly understand the mission and strategies of the organisations that they are working in (Osborne & Hammoud, 2017). The extant literature shows that when employees understand the overall strategies of their organisations, they are more likely to be satisfied and loyal (Groen, Wouters, & Wilderom, 2017).

This article is organised as follows: firstly, a literature review about the concepts of human resource practices and employee engagement is introduced. The literature review section further discusses the proposed conceptual framework together with the research hypotheses. Following this, the methodology that was adopted to collect and analyse the data is presented. Then the results and discussion of key findings are introduced. Finally, the contributions, limitations and scope of further research are presented.

The current study followed a quantitative research approach by adopting the survey method. The target population of this study was employees from the banking sector in Egypt. The banking sector was chosen to study the impact of HRM practices on employee engagement for several reasons. Firstly, the banking sector is considered one of the strongest economic sectors that have contributed to the development of the Egyptian economy over the past few years (Shared, 2019). Another reason is the wide adoption of HRM practices in the Egyptian banks (Zaky & Soliman, 2017), which represent the main construct in our study. From the purpose of the data collection, a link of an online survey was posted on the LinkedIn profiles of employees who work in a number of private and public banks in Egypt. After a period of 2 months, the researchers were able to get 228 complete questionnaires. The collected data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS Statistics 25).

The questionnaire was designed based on previously validated scales, where the researchers used a five-item Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. To measure selection and hiring, five items were adapted from Rathnaweera (2010). To measure training and development, four items were adapted from a study by Lee and Bruvold (2015). To measure job design, four items were adapted from Rathnaweera (2010). To measure job security, four items were adapted from Van Zyl et al. (2013). To measure rewards and payment, four items were adapted from Barrick et al. (2015). On the other hand, 10 items were adapted from Purcell (2010) to measure CE and EE. Five items were further adapted from Shuck and Reio (2014) to measure the BE. Finally, six items were adapted from Barrick et al. (2015) to measure the strategic implementation. The items of the questionnaire are displayed in Table 1.

The findings underscore the importance of HRM practices in enhancing the emotional, cognitive and behavioural dimensions of employee engagement. In particular, the article highlights the role of five important HRM practices which are selection and hiring, training and development, job design, job security, and rewards and payment. These findings are in line with the findings of some articles that showed the critical importance of HRM practices in enhancing employee engagement. For instance, Aktar and Pangil (2017) indicated that a variety of HRM practices, such as the job security and career development, are important to enhance the level of engagement. These findings have also been confirmed in the work of Jose (2012), which indicated that the level of employee engagement is determined by the level of satisfaction with the human resource practices.

Our findings provide an important contribution to the literature about employee engagement. For instance, the findings showed the importance of selection and hiring in enhancing the level of engagement. This view was supported in the literature, which indicated that the recruitment process plays an important role in predicting employees’ active engagement in the workplace (Bhutta & Zafar, 2019). Additionally, our findings highlighted the role of training and development in enhancing employee engagement. These findings have been supported by the work of Mansour (2020) which showed that the level of employee engagement depends on the training that employees get access to in the workplace. Another interesting finding of this article is the importance of job security in enhancing engagement levels of employees. This result finds much support in several empirical studies which indicated that employees’ perceptions of insecurity in the workplace will lead to poor performance and high levels of disengagement (Chen, 2018; Ugwu & Okojie, 2016). The importance of providing job security to employees has grown in importance, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic (Wilson et al., 2020). Our article shows the importance of providing job security, especially in counties like Egypt, where employees are generally looking for stability, where Egyptians, in general, are less likely to change their jobs and companies (Soliman & Wahba, 2019).

Our findings further underscore the importance of job design and reward systems in improving employee engagement. These findings are consistent with that of Tims and Bakker (2014), which showed that well-designed jobs can be inspiring for employees and can largely contribute to their level of engagement. Also, they are consistent with the findings of Waqas and Saleem (2014) that highlighted the role of monetary and non-monetary rewards in increasing the level of employee engagement and performance of organisations. However, our findings showed that strategic implementation does not moderate the relationship between HRM practices and employee engagement. This might be attributed to the lack of knowledge that employees have about the strategies and objectives of the Egyptian banks. These findings are not in line with the findings of Barrick et al. (2015) which showed that strategic implementation plays an important role in increasing employees’ performance and productivity. Thus, it is apparent that the majority of Egyptian banks have been unsuccessful in explaining their strategies to employees.

This article responds to several calls from management scholars for studying the factors that enhance employee engagement (Bhutta & Zafar, 2019; Jose, 2012). Through an empirical study by drawing a sample of employees from the banking sector in Egypt, this article was able to show the significant role of various HRM practices in enhancing employee engagement. Our study contributes by being one of the first studies that examine how HRM practices impact employee engagement in Egypt as an example of developing countries. Furthermore, the current study contributes by examining the three dimensions of employee engagement that were proposed by Shuck et al. (2017). This is considered important, where investigating the different facets of engagement provides a detailed explanation of the relatively new concept in the field of organisational behaviour studies.

Our study also provides some important guidelines for HR managers in the banking sector to follow in order to be able to enhance employee engagement. Firstly, organisations should ensure that they have effective hiring and selection policies. By doing this, they will be able to attract the best candidates that fit to the organisational culture. Another importance of this practice lies in the fact that when employees perceive that selection and hiring is conducted fairly, they will feel that their organisations apply fair HRM practices, which subsequently enhances their engagement. Also, organisations should not neglect the importance of continuous training and development of their staff. This is becoming very important with the new technological innovations that are introduced in the banking sector. Effective training that equips employees with relevant skills can make them more satisfied whilst doing their daily tasks. Another important HRM practice that should be developed is the job design. This could be conducted by designing jobs in a way that is flexible and decentralised, where employees should be given more freedom to do their tasks in their own way as long as they are doing it right. Furthermore, organisations should increase the perception of the job security by their employees, especially in countries like Egypt, where employees tend to have high risk avoidance. This HRM practice is becoming more important with the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, where many employees have high fears to be forced to leave their jobs. Also, organisations should provide fair compensation and reward systems that are based on performance. This is critical, where the findings showed the importance of this HRM practice in enhancing employee engagement. Finally, organisations should make sure to focus on internal marketing practices that ensure the alignment of all employees to the strategic objectives. This can be conducted by providing awareness sessions to employees about the mission statements, strategic objectives and key performance indicators of their organisations.

Despite the fact that this article provides important contributions to theory and practice, it has some limitations. Firstly, the article only examined the impact of five HRM practices on employee engagement. Future studies can further examine some other important HRM practices, such as the quality of work environment and work safety. Another limitation of our study is that it only examined employees working in one industry, that is, the banking sector in Egypt. Future studies can draw samples from other industries in different countries, where they can investigate how culture can impact the acceptance of HRM practices. Also, future studies can investigate each of the HRM practices separately to be able to provide a comparison of the impact of each of them on employee engagement. Furthermore, future studies can adopt qualitative approaches, which will provide an in-depth understanding of the factors that enhance employee engagement. Finally, further research is needed to examine how internal marketing practices influence employee engagement, especially in developing countries like Egypt.