ABSTRACT
Any organization's management highly depends on its human capital. The efficient use of an organization's resources – material, financial, informational, or human – is essential to its smooth operation. Therefore, it is also important to focus on employee and employee engagement. Employee or work engagement is a widely accepted topic. Companies are interested in this subject and work with agencies or attempt to independently assess the level of employee work engagement in order to determine the causes of high or low engagement rates and develop ways to raise it. Employees who work in retail were questioned for this study. The goal of the study is to determine the impact of managers on retail employees' level of work engagement based on their age, gender, and work status (manager or non-manager), A few questions were chosen from a variety of employee engagement measuring tools to assess the manager's influence. On a five-point Likert scale, respondents responded to 11 items in the survey (1 strongly disagree – 5 strongly agree), In order to compare the results after a year, the survey was done twice in Austria, once in May 2021 (during the active Covid-19 epidemic) and once in May 2022. Employees in the retail industry (N = 3047 in 2022 and N = 2535 in 2021) responded to an online survey sent to their company e-mail addresses. The findings indicate a little increase in employee work engagement between 2021 and 2022 of 1.2 per cent. The comparison reveals no significant variations between years and just marginally better or worse answers to a few questionnaire questions. Work engagement grew as a result of the manager's influence by 4.9 per cent in 2021 to an even 79 and by 5.6 per cent in 2022 to 80.9. © Vilnius University, 2002-2023.