Work commitment : Its dimensions and relationships with role stress and intention to quit

[摘要] A renewed interest in work has developed world-wide during the last decade.One of the reasons for this is that organizations are responding to thechanging economic, social, technological and environmental demands inways that are fundamentally transforming the nature of organizations and themeaning of work for employees. Work has changed tremendously, not only innature but also its importance. The current demands placed on organizationsand employees include, among others, global competition, cost-cutting, downsizingand restructuring and information processing on a large scale. It isintuitive to think that these changes and demands will affect employees insome way or the other. For many employees changes brought different jobdescriptions, more roles to fulfil and more complicated tasks to complete withmore uncertainty and less clear-cut instructions.The work commitment construct has been part of a lively debate sinceMorrow's (1983) call for a moratorium on the development of further workcommitment measures due to the existence of concept redundancy within andamong the work commitment facets. It has been proposed that the workcommitment construct consists of four main facets i.e. job involvement,organizational commitment, career commitment and work values. It hasbeen unclear up to now on how these facets are interrelated. Therelationships between the work commitment facets, role strain and intention toquit have also not been studied together in a single study before.The current study investigated the underlying dimensions of the workcommitment construct, the underlying dimensions of each proposed facet, aswell as determined the relationships among the work commitment facets, rolestrain and intention to quit, based on a large diverse South African sample.This was done by using Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses, thecalculation of intercorrelations and Structural Equation Modeling. Eachinstrument was standardized for South African conditions.The results indicated that although the instruments were portable to SouthAfrica, unique results and factors were obtained. Promising results wereobtained with regard to the causal relationships among the variables.

[发布机构] University of Pretoria