When Michelle, managing director of global sourcing for a US-based lifestyle company, received the results of the first engagement survey at her organisation in Asia, she was deeply disappointed.

In one point her judgment was correct. Remuneration and benefits were rated as fair and in line with expectations. That was exactly where Michelle’s focus had been. She centred on so-called rational commitment factors like income, learning opportunities and health benefits and believed that investing in these tangible areas would drive higher engagement.

However, a global study by the Corporate Leadership Council has revealed that rational commitment factors lead to higher engagement only for about 20 per cent of all surveyed employees. The same study shows that various emotional commitment factors lead to higher engagement: emotional commitment to the manager: 32 per cent; to the team: 44 per cent; to the organisation: 51 per cent; to the job: 56 per cent.

Confronted with these research findings, it dawned on Michelle why engagement levels were not up to her expectations. Her organisation’s focus was purely on optimising rational commitment factors, which is useful to some extent but won’t suffice if emotional commitment factors are missing. And emotional commitment factors are tightly linked to leadership.

As a result, she decided to scale back some of the less critical benefits and invest more in leadership development and the selection process for internal succession and external recruitment. All of this paid dividends for the company.

The focus on rational commitment factors such as salary and benefits to drive engagement is understandable but has two downsides: it positively affects engagement for a smaller minority of employees and is relatively expensive. Driving emotional commitment is proven to have a far bigger impact on employee engagement even if it is less tangible than rational commitment factors.

This article appeared in the Classified Post print edition as Emotional scenes.