Enhancing and sustaining employee engagement through HRM practices: A study on Indian unicorn startups

This study focuses on human resource management (HRM) practices that encourage employee engagement. It aims to explore the relationship between HRM practices and employee engagement and also investigates the moderating role of employee gender between both variables. The study applied a cross-sectional research design alongside correlational and regression analysis to evaluate the responses of 410 employees working in unicorn startups based in Gurgaon, New Delhi, and Mumbai through the structured survey questionnaires. Regarding the respondents’ gender, the majority are male (70%), and female constitutes 30%. However, the study results demonstrated that no matter an employee’s age or gender, effective HRM practices have a strong positive correlation with employee engagement (β = 0.93; p < 0.001). The results of the regression model show that HRM practices have explained 87% of the variance in employee engagement, which indicates that most of the employee engagement level depends on the best HRM practices of the organization. The gender differences do not significantly moderate this relationship. The F value in ANOVA analysis showed the overall significance of the model. The findings illustrated that by improving skills and promoting employee engagement, individuals experience heightened satisfaction levels and assume greater responsibility for their assigned duties.