Title: Employee Engagement - Sporting goods retail stores in Gävle.

Level: Second cycle, Final assignment for Master Degree in Business Administration

Author: Maria Claudia Sun Han Cordova and Camille Besnault

Supervisor: Maria Fregidou-Malama and Pär Vilhelmson Date: 2013 - May  

Purpose: This study examines employee engagement. For that matter, we investigate the factors that influence employee engagement in sporting goods retail stores, and the impact of relationships interactions between the team and the manager.  

Method: This study was conducted through a deductive approach. The data was collected from two sporting goods retail stores: Stadium and Intersport, located in Gävle, Sweden; through questionnaires for both store’s employees, and face-to-face interviews to the store managers and employees. Finally, data was analyzed with the programs Microsoft Excel and SPSS.  

Result  &  Conclusions:  We  found  out  that  sporting  goods  retail  store’s  employees  were mainly motivated by personal factors, job satisfaction factors and intrinsic factors, such as belongingness to the team. It appears that employees give significance importance to the relationship  they  have  with  their  manager  and  coworkers.  We  also  found  out  that  the relationship with the customers has a huge impact on employee engagement.

Suggestions for future research: This research was conducted in a geographic area in a specific  country  (Sweden).  Additionally,  it  is  based  on  the  sporting  goods  retail  market. Thus, it could be interesting to extend this research to others sectors and markets, or to do the same research in another country.

Contribution  of  the  thesis:  While  theories  about  employee  engagement  consider  the relationship between employees and co-workers, and employees and manager as important for  employee  engagement,  we  empirically  discovered  that  the  relationship  between employees and customers influences employee engagement significantly.

Key  words:  Job  satisfaction,  employee  engagement,  sporting  goods  retails,  motivation, relationships.