Employee Engagement in Manufacturing: A Stimulus–Organism–Response Framework of Psychological Empowerment

HRMARS - Employee engagement remains a critical yet persistently challenging issue for organizations, particularly in structured, operational environments. Despite extensive research, prevailing approaches often emphasize direct associations between workplace conditions and engagement, offering limited insight into the psychological processes underlying engagement. Addressing this limitation, this conceptual paper advances a process-based framework of employee engagement grounded in the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) model. The proposed framework conceptualizes ethical leadership, psychological safety, and role clarity as organizational stimuli that shape employees’ internal psychological state of empowerment, which, in turn, gives rise to employee engagement as a behavioral response. By positioning psychological empowerment as the central organismic mechanism, the paper provides a coherent explanation of how organizational conditions are cognitively and affectively internalized by employees. While the framework is theoretically generalizable, it is particularly relevant to multinational manufacturing organizations operating in Malaysia, where hierarchical structures and operational demands strongly influence employee experience. The paper develops a set of theoretically grounded propositions and outlines implications for future empirical research and organizational practice.