The relationship among job characteristics organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions
Authors: Ahmad Arfat 
Published: July 2018

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underlying reciprocity mechanism which governs the relationship between employer and employee at their workplaces in a perspective whereby intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job satisfaction are considered as proxy to organizational offerings, while multi overall job satisfaction and dimensional organizational commitment as employee’ attitudinal reaction to the organizational offerings. Under the aforementioned notion, the present study intends to examine the influence of job characteristics on employees’ attitudes, such as, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions as psychological response to job characteristics. In a way, the study attempts to insight into how employee’ reciprocate to the perceived obligation toward its organization. The study also aims to supplement the empirical evidence about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction. Although various studies exhibit positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment has been consistently reported. However, for the managerial implication, the identification of employee physiological and psychological needs to gauge the understanding of mechanism by which of employee’ reacts to its environment and develop attitude toward their job and organization is imperative. In this context, this study makes a humble attempt to clear the relationships in the perspective of reciprocation between organization and its employees. Thus, this study attempts to illustrate how feeling a need to reciprocate, those who experienced strong satisfaction with job characteristics appear to have had a sense of moral duty to the organization can be helpful in understanding the processes by which organizational inducements exert their influence on other employee attitudes and behaviors. Evidently, while the link between employees’ satisfaction with their job and high organizational commitment, on the one hand, and low intentions to leave on the other is fairly straightforward, yet there in need to study these variables as exogenous and endogenous to inquire about their causation. Also, the available present literature on the understudy concern genuinely lacks adequate empirical material about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction as such some author hold that intrinsic characteristic of job better predict job satisfaction while as another set of behavioral scientists found extrinsic job characteristics as prime determinant of job satisfaction compare to the intrinsic worth of their jobs. The present study was conducted in the state of depressed economy where unemployment rate is as high as 194 percent it was found interesting to investigate the about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job in determining the job satisfaction. The present study also attempts to supplement the empirical evidence in this direction.

Design/methodology/approach

Since the study use the tenets of situational theories of employee’ attitude which assume that employee’ attitude results from the psychological evaluation of one’s job characteristics or other aspects of the environment in the organization; therefore, the study integrates the job characteristics as the organizational offerings to its employee and employees attitude like job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions as reciprocity reaction to the organizational offerings. The structural equation model was used to frames the intricacy job characteristics, job satisfaction and organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions. Ten job characteristics were identified with which employees experience at the workplace as organizational offerings. These include salary, recognition, co-workers, supervision, organizational policies, promotion, working condition, task requirement, job security and nature of work. Subsequently, these identified facets were divided into intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job satisfaction, and were considering as proxy to the organizational offerings to its employees. These job characteristics were identified during in-depth interviews and discussions with the respondents, while overall job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employees’ turnover intentions were considered as employee’s psychological reactions to the organizational offerings. The sample consists of 654 hospital employees, working at the different hospital across state. In order to ensure the representation of the entire human capital, employees working under different levels of occupational status and different sectors of economy were included in the for the purpose of data collection. The number of employees from each hospital has been selected through proportionate method. Employees from each hospital were selected on the basis of the chit method. Measurement tools Questionnaire method was used to collect the data for the present study. A five-point likert type scale was used for the sake of maintaining uniformity in measuring the variables. All the variables were measured with multiple-item scales, questionnaire item used to measure different constructs in this study are derived from the previously established studies. As such, multidimensional organizational commitment construct was measured using items drawn from Meyer and Allen (1991) scale. Job characteristics and employee’ turnover intentions scale was adapted from the study conducted by Ali Muhammadet al.(2008). The instrument used for the present study has universal application. Therefore the results thus produce are of universal significance. The reliability and validity of measurement tools for the study was established by the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Findings

The findings from the study reveal employees’ subjective evaluation to the intrinsic and extrinsic factors of job contribute to the formation of their reciprocal perspective of psychological attitude toward its job and organization characterized as their job satisfaction and organizational commitment. As such, better evaluation of job content and job context by the employees leads to the sense of obligation and commitment toward the organization, hence reduces their intentions to discord organizational membership. The findings also reveal that employees tend to incline their job satisfaction more toward the extrinsic worth of job than the intrinsic worth. While as both, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, explains relatively equal variation in the employees’ turnover intentions. The relatively strong correlation of extrinsic characteristics of job could be attributed to the fact that professionals generally have limited control over extrinsic factors and have high degree of control over intrinsic elements. Therefore, their perceptions of the job are particularly dependent on the degree of satisfaction with the extrinsic factors (Pearson and Seiler, 1983).

Originality/value

Although there are various studies manifested the relationship between job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee turnover intentions, for all that, the present work is an attempt to deem these relationships in a different panorama to bring more insight in the subject of organizational behavior. In this study, the relationship among the job characteristics, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and employee’ turnover intentions were considered in a perspective of reciprocity norms. The study opens new horizons to the researchers across the globe, whereby organizational and job characteristics are considered as catalyst for the employee’ attitude and can be study and analyze in a functional relationship model. A new regime of paradigm may investigate the functional relationship between employer offerings as an input and employee attitudes as an output, with more emphasis on the organizational equilibrium. Hence, study encompass the managerial implication by gauging the understanding of mechanism by which of employee’ reacts to the workplace environment and develop attitude toward their job and organization. In this way, the propositions expatiated in the present work improves the understanding for the implications of various motivational theories, different organizational theories and human resource management models. Moreover, this work substantiates and provides insight about the competing power of intrinsic and extrinsic job factors on job satisfaction and opens debate for the generalization of Herzberg’s motivation theory.