Beyond the buzzword: Mapping two decades of employee engagement research through a bibliometric lens (2002–2023)

Abstract

Researches based on Employee engagement has grown significantly since Kahn (1990) first defined the construct, and till date there are very minimal studies which systematically mapped the field's intellectual structure has evolved over the past two decades. Around 2,490 articles from Scopus and Dimensions.ai-indexed articles published between 2002 and 2023 are gathered for this study. Bibliometric technique was the main approach used for this study, which concentrated to trace the trends of publication, patterns involved in citations, authorship networks and thematic development in this particular field. VOSviewer-based mapping and bibliographic coupling identify the authors, the institutions and the country collaborations that anchor the discipline. Keyword cooccurrence clustering surfaces six groupings. These six thematic groupings span leadership, being and organizational commitment. These six thematic groupings tie employee engagement to psychology, human resource management and organizational behaviour. Publication output increased consistently after 2010. Then dropped in 2023. We interpret this drop not as a sign of importance but as evidence of a more mature theoretical foundation. Still bibliometric mapping alone cannot prove the reason, behind this change.Taken together, the findings give researchers a structured map of where employee engagement scholarship has concentrated and where its next contributions are likely to emerge.