THE IMPACT OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ON INTERNAL BRAND EQUITY IN INSURANCE INDUSTRY IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

Employees are the most valuable asset in the insurance sector, and employee satisfaction is a crucial driver to achieving the performance of an organization. High employee engagement leads to increased job satisfaction, performance, and employee retention and reflects positive overall employee engagement. Scholarly findings have been made in other industries in other countries but are limited to the insurance industry of Sri Lanka. The main empirical gap leads to the study of the impact of employee engagement and internal brand equity. The study focuses on understanding how internal branding is important to the service sector as it directly affects competitiveness. The researcher has taken four employee engagement independent variables of internal communication, training, brand knowledge and leadership and internal brand equity as dependent variables. The 385 samples were selected through the Morgan table out of a total employee of 11,677 in the insurance industry. The reliability and validity tests proved the balance of responses, and Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression, and normality tests were performed to analyze the data through SPSS software. A structured questionnaire was used to get responses from employees. Findings reveal that internal communication, brand knowledge, training and leadership have a significant impact on internal brand equity in the Sri Lankan insurance industry. Out of four variables, leadership plays a pivotal role in impacting the internal brand equity of insurance firms in Sri Lanka. The findings proved that employee engagement is key for the improvement of brand equity of insurance firms where guidance is given for management to critically focus on the above aspect. The enhancements of communication strategies, training metho