A Study on Perceived Organizational Culture, Job Characteristics and Organizational Commitment
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Min Kyeong-Won , Lee Hee-Su 
Published: June 2018

This study started from the question that discussion on relationship between job characteristics in human resources management and organizational culture has not been much developed. The aim of this study is to explore relationship among organizational culture, job characteristics and organizational commitment. Additionally the study includes exploring if job characteristics can play a mediating role in between organizational culture and organizational commitment. Employees in multi-national companies are selected as proper targets. The multi-national companies have different organizational culture compared to the mother company as well as the local companies having employees from multi-cultural background, and even job designs are affected by the mother company, which can explain relationship of set variable effectively.
With concept of an organizational culture coming from the five(5) cultural dimensions of Hofstede(1984), the three out of five cultural dimensions: high uncertainty avoidance, long term-short term orientation, and individualism-collectivism were used in this study, based on factor analysis results of a previous research. Most multi-cultural companies value positive relationship with the local members and organizational commitment. Rather than an external factor such as salary, whether employees are satisfied with the work itself or job characteristics is deemed as an important factor to increase organizational commitment.
The job characteristics are classified into 5 sub-factors: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback with which the employees tend to experience motivation and job satisfaction, and consequently better organizational achievement. The multinational companies need to treat the job design in regards to job characteristics in a cultural point of view. Compared to a single organization, multinational companies require much more understanding about language barrier and employees’ culture. As major concepts of variables are presented above, the study was set out. By analyzing the responses of 283 employees of foreign multinational companies in Seoul, the following implications and limitations were found.
First of all, the organizational culture multinational companies has a positive effect on organizational commitment and it was found that the bigger the uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and collectivism, the higher the organizational engagement. The long-term orientation affects on productivity indices such as organizational commitment, meaning that the eastern oriental value with the long-term point of view can work effectively in the multinational companies. This result also found that the Korean members do not prefer uncertain work environment, which the multi-national companies those seek for profit rather than stability and short term achievement rather than long term achievement should consider. It is shown that the collectivism affect more on organizational commitment than individualism, as in other previous researches. These results will provide practical implications to the executives as well as the managers of multinational companies in regards to organizational design and management within Korea.
Second, among the organization culture of multinational companies uncertainty avoidance and long term orientation had a positive relationship with the five job characteristics. However, individualism-collectivism gave a positive effect on skill variety only out of the job characteristics while showing a negative effect on feedback, having no significant effect on other three.