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

Abstract

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 the changing economic, social, technological and environmental demands in ways that are fundamentally transforming the nature of organizations and the meaning of work for employees. Work has changed tremendously, not only in nature but also its importance. The current demands placed on organizations and employees include, among others, global competition, cost-cutting, downsizing and restructuring and information processing on a large scale. It is intuitive to think that these changes and demands will affect employees in some way or the other. For many employees changes brought different job descriptions, more roles to fulfil and more complicated tasks to complete with more uncertainty and less clear-cut instructions. The work commitment construct has been part of a lively debate since Morrow's (1983) call for a moratorium on the development of further work commitment measures due to the existence of concept redundancy within and among the work commitment facets. It has been proposed that the work commitment construct consists of four main facets i.e. job involvement, organizational commitment, career commitment and work values. It has been unclear up to now on how these facets are interrelated. The relationships between the work commitment facets, role strain and intention to quit have also not been studied together in a single study before. The current study investigated the underlying dimensions of the work commitment construct, the underlying dimensions of each proposed facet, as well as determined the relationships among the work commitment facets, role strain and intention to quit, based on a large diverse South African sample. This was done by using Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses, the calculation of intercorrelations and Structural Equation Modeling. Each instrument was standardized for South African conditions. The results indicated that although the instruments were portable to South Africa, unique results and factors were obtained. Promising results were obtained with regard to the causal relationships among the variables.