How does the role of a supervisor increase or decrease employee engagement?

Much has been written on this... suffice it to say that supervisors create a large part of the work environment, and environment trumps will. So no matter how determined an individual may be, her boss has a disproportionate effect on her success just by influencing the emotional climate of the relationships in the group or department.

This is not to mention that the supervisor is directly responsible for the career of the report.

To the degree that these two elements are producing less than optimal results for an employee, engagement is diminished.

These are sure fire ways for supervisors to decrease employee engagement:
1. Be a micromanager
2. Take credit for the ideas of your employees
3. Ignore all ideas or suggestions from your employees since your are over them, only your ideas can be worthwhile.
4. Play favorites
5. Don't communicate with others, particularly about goals, strategies, and vision

As you can tell, based on the responses here, there is overwhelming agreement that the supervisor/boss/superior is the key to worker engagement. It only takes one "boss" in the chain of command to cause an employee to dis-engage and eventually leave.

Lesson: Your supervisors should have ongoing, continuous training regarding 'being a boss'.

Bottomline: The Company has only itself to blame if employees leave, esp high potential talent.

The supervisor-direct report relationship is vital to the well-being of the working matrix. There has been so much written on this topic and much of it due to feedback received from various surveys and other informal inquiries.

Gail has listed some of the more common negative points. A couple of others I have seen repeatedly are:

-Gossiping about a direct report
-Poorly delivered performance reviews

Bottom line... people want to be appreciated, made to feel a part of "something" and want to be a contributor. It all seems so logical and easy, but evidently, from the data that is collected on this topic, it is not. There is still a lot of work to be done.

I agree with the posts so far and would add that the actual "job" of a supervisor needs to be examined. Many supervisors believe (and their organizations support) that their job is to "inspect" the work of their direct reports. This constant "looking over people's shoulders" is demoralizing and inappropriate.

Rather than managing by inspection, i recommend managing by expectation. If every employee has meaningful, measurable goals then the supervisor can negotiate expectations of what will get done by when. With a regular reporting system, supervisors can spend far less time inspecting and far more time coaching.

This shift tends to improve employee morale and engagement.

Thank you for your answers everyone! What would you say makes a good supervisor? Certain traits, experience, training, etc.

Caty,
My experience is that engagement and your brand live and die at the front line supervisor level. The average employee interacts minimally with C level management.
James Heskett wrote a great book a few years back and stated unequivocably that one bad manager can pollute an entire organization upwards and downwards.
The key to engagement is trust, respect, responsibility, information, and feedback. Those all "live" with the immediate manager. Poor frontline management = poor engagement every time.

The present study suggests that the relationship between the two forms of trust and
work engagement is mutually reinforcing overtime. More specifically, this study
proposes an upward spiral effect: high levels of trust in top management, immediate
supervisor and co-workers and a high tendency to trust others boosts work
engagement, which subsequently increases trust at all three levels of the
organizational hierarchy by positively affecting an individual’s propensity to trust.