Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
On
THE RELATIONSHIP OF JOB EMBEDDEDNESS
WITH ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT
AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT
Academic Session 2009-11
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 3
ABSTRACT 4
1 INTRODUCTION 5
4 METHODOLOGY 14
7 DISCUSSION 22
8 REFERNCES 23-25
9 QUESTIONNAIRE 26-28
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The success of any research study depends upon a number of factors among which the
proper guidance from the experts in the industry and a faculty plays an important role.
We take this opportunity to convey our sincere thanks and gratitude to all those who have
directly or indirectly helped and contributed towards the completion of this project.
We take here a great opportunity to express our sincere and deep sense of gratitude to Prof.
Mahima Thakur for giving us an opportunity to work on this project. The support & guidance
from Ma’am, was of great help & it was extremely valuable.
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ABSTRACT
This research studies the relationship between job embeddedness, organization commitment
and psychological empowerment. Further, the study links each dimension of psychological
empowerment (meaning, competence, self-determination and impact) with job
embeddedness. Affective and Normative Commitment are also linked to embeddedness. In a
sample of xx, analysis revealed that job embeddedness is positively related to both
commitment and empowerment. Implications are discussed.
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INTRODUCTION
This research studies the relationship between job embeddedness and organizational
commitment. It also studies the relationship between job embeddedness and psychological
empowerment. We used Job Embeddedness instead of Job Satisfaction. The difference
between JS and JE: First, the focus of JS is on-the-job, not off-the-job. Second, there are
multiple measures of JS (e.g., Job Descriptive Index, Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire)
and most measures include multiple dimensions. These dimensions include attributes about
one's work environment, supervision, co-workers and pay (Griffeth et al., 2000). Sacrifice-
organization is meant to focus on what people would “give up” if they left their job. It does
not include items assessing one's affective reactions to the work itself, their supervision or co-
workers.
Thus, the PSQ includes constructs and items which are not conceptualized as part of job
embeddedness.
In summary, job satisfaction has some similarities with and differences from job
embeddedness.
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OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
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Second, we sought to show the relationship between embeddedness and psychological
empowerment. Earlier studies related psychological empowerment to access information and
resources, role ambiguity (Spreitzer, 1996), effectiveness, work satisfaction, and job related
strain (Spreitzer et al.,1997). Menon (2001) relates psychological empowerment to
organizational commitment, job involvement, and citizenship behavior. Bhatnagar (2005)
also relates psychological empowerment to organizational commitment. Psychological
empowerment has been found to be significantly related to job satisfaction; however, the
individual constructs have received varied results (Carless, 2004; Seibert, Silver, &
Randolph, 2004; Liden, Lucas, & Sparrowe, 2000; Spreitzer et al., 1997). We sought to show
the relationship of these individual dimensions of psychological empowerment, with job
embeddedness (which is a broader concept than job satisfaction). When considering
embeddedness, Mitchell et al. (2001) found, using a sample of retail employees and hospital
workers, that job embeddedness was associated with lower intention to leave as well as actual
voluntary turnover. Crossley, Bennett, Jex, and Burnfield (2007) confirmed these findings,
extending Mitchell et al.’s study by finding that embeddedness interacted with satisfaction to
predict turnover in a study of employees of an assisted living organization.
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REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Job Embeddedness
The term “embeddedness” has been used in the sociological literature to explain the process
by which social relations influence and constrain economic action (Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi,
1996, 1997). This process reflects the idea of social networks as a constraint or “stuckness.”
Based on the sociological concept of embeddedness, Mitchell and his colleagues (2001) first
conceptualized job embeddedness as focusing narrowly on individuals staying with their
organization. Specifically, they saw job Embeddedness as representing the totality of forces
that keep employees in their current employment. Employees become tied to their
organizations through many different types of links, investments and affective and cognitive
appraisals that create a net or web of restraining forces. Individuals with more types of
restraining forces are more embedded and less likely to voluntarily exit the organization.
Reflecting the idea of employees’ being “situated or connected in a social web,” job
embeddedness has several key aspects: (a) the extent to which people have links to other
people or activities in and outside the organization, (b) the extent to which their jobs and
communities fit other aspects in their “life spaces,” and (c) what they would give up if they
left their present settings. Mitchell and his colleagues refer to these three dimensions as links,
fit, and sacrifice, respectively, and these dimensions have both on-the-job factors (e.g., the
organization or job) and off-the-job factors (e.g., family or community).
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One way to conceptualize these differences is to consider the role of resources in the
development of each construct. Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1988,
1998) proposes that individuals are motivated by the desire to obtain and protect resources, or
those things they personally value. As resources are acquired, they may be further invested to
obtain additional resources (Hobfoll, 2001). Both engagement and embeddedness develop as
a result of an abundance of resources (Gorgievski & Hobfoll, in press). However, as
suggested in the preceding paragraph, engagement and embeddedness have different resource
bases. As such, we would expect them to be independent constructs.
For example, the resources contributing to engagement are more specific to the nature of the
work (De Lange, De Witte, & Notelaers, 2008; Hakanen, Schaufeli, & Ahola, 2008; Van den
Broeck, De Witte, Lens, & Vansteenkiste, 2008). While these resources may be somewhat
job- or workplace-dependent (e.g., one may be afforded more flexibility at some
organizations or in certain positions), they tend to focus on the nature of the work. As an
example, many of the resources that faculty can draw on to further their engagement in
research and teaching are quite similar as they move from university to university (e.g., skill
utilization and task autonomy; cf., Van den Broeck et al., 2008). Conversely, embeddedness
resources are restricted to the organization and position. When an individual moves to
another organization, he or she would not move the links with other people with him or her;
further, the perceived fit necessarily changes due to the new work environment. Gorgievski
and Hobfoll (in press) suggest that specific motivational resources (e.g., flexibility, balance,
diversity, interdependence, and tolerance for failure) increase engagement with work. For
example, they define individual flexibility as including cognitive flexibility (ability to
consider alterative viewpoints) and emotional flexibility (tolerating a wide range of
emotions). Balance is defined in terms of the appropriate management of demands within
various domains (e.g., work, family) in order to replenish motivational resources. Diversity
supports engagement through the challenge of coordinating conflicting ideas and a mix of
skills among team members. Interdependence encourages engagement by developing 244
Jonathon R.B. Halbesleben et al. collective efficacy, supporting the desire to perform at high
levels for group success. Tolerance for failure is necessary for engagement to the extent that
it supports creativity and risktaking, the rewards from which can further support engagement.
These resources may be more fleeting than those associated with embeddedness, which tend
to emerge over long periods (e.g., links to other people in the organization, higher sacrifice if
one leaves). Moreover, engagement can be eroded when resources are expended to meet
demands at work.
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For example, where balance of role demands (e.g., work_family balance) is a resource
leading to engagement, it may be expended when an employee is swamped with a specific
project that requires all of his or her attention.
In sum, both engagement and embeddedness result from an accumulation of individual
resources. As such we would expect them to be related constructs (both resource-based), but
because their resource bases differ, they are independent constructs. As we will argue in the
following sections, these differences in resources help to explain their unique contribution to
outcome variables.
Organizational Commitment
Affective Commitment
Affective Commitment (AC) is the degree of an employee’s emotional attachment to,
identification with, and involvement in the organization (Allen and Meyer, 1990). AC is
defined as the employee’s emotional attachment to the organization. As a result, he or she
strongly identifies with the goals of the organization and desires to remain a part of the
organization. The employee makes a commitment to the organization because he/she “wants
to”.
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Normative Commitment
Normative Commitment (NC) is the degree to which an employee feels some sense of
obligation to remain with an organization. The individual commits to and remains with an
organization because of the feeling of obligation. For instance, the organization may have
invested resources to train an employee, who then feels an obligation to put forth the effort on
the job and stay with the organization to “repay the debt”. It may also reflect an internalized
norm, developed before the person joins the organization, through family or other
socialization processes that one should be loyal to one’s organization. The employee stays
with the organization because he/she “ought to”.
Psychological Empowerment
Psychological empowerment has its roots in early work on employee alienation and quality of
work life. Rather than focusing on managerial practices that share power with employees at
all levels, the psychological perspective is focused on how employees experience
empowerment at work. This perspective refers to empowerment as the personal beliefs that
employees have about their role in relation to the organization. When people are feel
empowered at work, they experience four dimensions including:
1) Meaning: Meaning involves a fit between the needs of one's work role and one's
beliefs, values and behaviours.
2) Competence: Competence refers to self-efficacy specific to one's work, or a belief in
one's capability to perform work activities with skill.
3) Self-determination: Self-determination is a sense of choice in initiating and regulating
one's actions. It reflects a sense of autonomy over the initiation and continuation of
work behaviour and processes (e.g., making decisions about work methods, pace, and
effort).
4) Impact: Impact is the degree to which one can influence strategic, administrative, or
operating outcomes at work.
Together, these four cognitions reflect an active, rather than passive, orientation to one's work
role. In other words, the experience of empowerment is manifest in all four dimensions – if
any one dimension is missing, then the experience of empowerment will be limited. For
example, if people have discretion to make decisions (i.e., self-determination) but they don’t
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care about the kinds of decisions they can make (i.e., they lack a sense of meaning), they will
not feel empowered. Alternatively, if people believe they can make an impact but don’t feel
like they have the skills and abilities to do their job well (i.e., they lack a sense of
competence), they will not feel empowered as well.
Perceived Control
Perceived Control (PC) includes beliefs about authority, decision-making, availability of
resources, and autonomy in the scheduling and performance of work, etc.
Perceived Competence
Perceived Competence (COMP) reflects role-mastery, which besides requiring the skilful
accomplishment of one or more assigned tasks, also requires successful coping with non-
routine role-related situations.
Goal Internalization
Goal Internalization (GI) dimension captures the energizing property of a worthy cause or
exciting vision provided by the organizational leadership.
In recent times, “organizational researchers and business practitioners have focused more on
psychological empowerment in the workplace” (Spreitzer et al., 1999). This observation of
Spreitzer et al. (1999), is supported by Menon (2001) who looks at workplace empowerment
as “the major new industrial weapon against domestic and international threats”. This
growing interest in employee empowerment is the result of studies conducted in leadership
and management skills (Bennis and Nanus, 1985), power and control (Kanter, 1979), and
team building (Beckhard, 1969). These studies suggest that employee empowerment is a
principal component of managerial and organizational effectiveness, and plays a crucial role
in team development and maintenance (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). Empowerment has been
defined by Conger and Kanungo (1988) as “a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy
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among members of organizations through the identification of conditions that foster
powerlessness and their removal both by formal organizational practices and informal
techniques of providing efficacy information”. Thomas and Velthouse (1990) further,
developed the general approach to empowerment taken by Conger and Kanungo. Thomas and
Velthouse argued that empowerment is a multifaceted approach, and defined it more broadly
as “increased intrinsic task motivation” manifested in a set of four cognitions reflecting an
individual’s orientation to his or her work role: impact, competence, meaning, and choice
(Spreitzer, 1995). Impact is seen as “making a difference” in terms of accomplishing the
purpose of the task (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). Competence is an individual’s ability to
perform activities skillfully (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). Meaning is the value of the task
goal or purpose, judged in relation to the individual’s own ideals or standards (Thomas and
Velthouse, 1990), while choice is “causal responsibility for a person’s actions” (Thomas and
Velthouse, 1990). Spreitzer (1995) did the research on Thomas and Velthouse’s
multidimensional conceptualization and began the process of construct validation. Several
studies have been conducted using Spreitzer’s empowerment measurement. Although
Spreitzer’s (1995, 1996) measure assesses multiple dimensions of empowerment, “it does not
tap into that aspect of empowerment that is related to inspiring leadership or an exciting
organizational vision” (Menon, 2001). Menon (2001) developed a new instrument to measure
psychological empowerment. Menon’s 15-item, three component instrument attempts to
capture feelings of goal internalization, perceived control and perceived competence (Menon,
2001).
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METHODOLOGY ADOPTED
Measures
In the questionnaire, respondents were asked to respond to questions related to their
demographic information (job position, gender, and ethnicity), the revised job embeddedness
questionnaire, as well as measures of organizational commitment and psychological
empowerment. For all variables, the mean of the items represented the final score.
Psychological Empowerment
Respondents were asked to use a five-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to
“strongly agree” to report on perceived level of empowerment.
Organizational Commitment
Job Embeddedness
Although most items corresponded directly to Mitchell and associates’ measure of job
embeddedness, a few minor edits were required to fit the measure to the current sample’s
setting. Items were anchored by a five-point scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree).
Sample
Mailed questionnaires were used to collect data from the sample. The total sample size was
12 with the number of males being 11 and the number of females, 1.
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HYPOTHESIS FORMATION
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Second, we hypothesize that an employee will be more embedded if he/she enjoys a greater
psychological empowerment. Let us briefly take some examples from the Mitchell et al.
(2001) job embeddedness measure to provide a more grounded understanding of how job
embeddedness is directly related to psychological empowerment. Imagine a workplace where
most people strongly agree with the following statements: “I feel like I am a good match for
my organization,” “I really love the place I live,” “I would sacrifice a lot if I left this job,”
“My family roots are in this community,” and “I work closely with my co-workers.” Such
setting is possible when the employee feels that he/she is empowered to make a decision.
Contrast this situation with a workplace populated by those who are less embedded in their
jobs and communities (e.g., people who feel they don’t fit in their work group or community,
or people who have little to sacrifice in renegotiating their relationships to their jobs). In this
sort of environment, even if they like their jobs, employees will not enjoy the same
psychological empowerment as in the previous case.
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there should be a positive correlation between psychological empowerment and job
embeddedness.
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RESULT AND ANALYSIS
Descriptive Measures
Job embeddedness
Mean 3.691667
Median 4
Mode 4
Standard deviation 1.090801
As the standard deviation is very close to 1 most of the respondents are in consensus
Organisational commitment
Affective Normative Overall
Mean 3.458333 3.604167 3.516667
Median 4 4 4
Mode 4 4 4
Standard 0.963233 1.086466 1.012388
deviation
The overall organisation commitment score lies between affective and normative
Psychological empowerment
meaning competency Self impact overall
determination
Mean 3.777778 3.472222 3.75 3.666666667 3.648148
Median 4 4 4 4 4
Mode 4 4 4 4 4
Standard 0.929243 1.055221339 1.055289706 1.09014 1.016819
deviation
The results reveal that self determination is the most important aspect in psychological
empowerment with a mean score of 3.75. The respondents strongly agree to it.
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Correlation coefficient between normative organisational commitment and Job
embeddedness = 0.137860189
There exists a very low correlation between organisational commitment and job
embeddedness, the reason of which might be small sample size. Similarly, there is a low
correlation between psychological empowerment and job embeddedness.
TCS Others
Job embeddedness Mean 3.475 3.6375
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Empowerment
Median/Mode 4/4 4/4
Standard deviation 0.9706 1.040551
TCS has lower job embeddedness as compared to other organizations in the sample.
However, the organizational commitment is higher owing to higher affective organizational
commitment. Psychological Empowerment is also higher for other organizations.
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DISCUSSION
The current study is unique in that it tests the relationship between Job Embeddedness,
Organizational Commitment and Psychological Empowerment. It is important to emphasize
that embeddedness was conceptualized specifically as reflecting the totality of forces that
constrain one from leaving his or her current employment. It captures those factors that
embed and keep one in the present position.
First, Job Embeddedness seems to have a positive, but very low and maybe insignificant,
correlation with Organizational Commitment. This rejects our initial hypothesis. The reasons
for this maybe:
Small Sample Size: The sample size of the study was 12. This is really small and no serious
inferences can be made from such a small sample.
We also acknowledge that we did not include the community dimension of job
embeddedness. To some extent, this was intentional, as a comparison between commitment
and community embeddedness would have limited value as they are conceptually quite
different constructs. However, community embeddedness has specific value in predicting
work outcomes, particularly turnover (Lee et al., 2004) and thus should be considered in
future research.
The data collected is from a single source, i.e. Employee Rating. Management Rating could
also have been included for more accurate results.
Second, Job Embeddedness seems to have a positive but low correlation with Psychological
Empowerment. The reasons for this are the similar to those cited above.
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Questionnaire
Please read the questions and answer them in the next page.
7. Keeping things in view, I can say that there cannot be a better place for me to work.
8. I believe the prospects for continuing employment with my organization are excellent.
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13. I participate in recreational activities in organisation.
18. My job utilizes my skills and gives me opportunity for self development.
20. I can see how my job contributes to the overall success of my organization.
27. I have considerable opportunity for independence and freedom on how I do my job.
Please rate your level of agreement for the previously mentioned questions in the scale
of 1 to 5. (1- Strongly disagree, 2- Disagree, 3- No opinion, 4- Agree and 5- Strongly
agree)
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