ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND JOB SATISFACTION: A STUDY OF EMPLOYEES IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY IN BANGALORE, INDIA

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT AND JOB SATISFACTION: A STUDY OF EMPLOYEES IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY IN BANGALORE, INDIA

The integral part of any management process is to manage the people at work. A well managed organisation sees worker as the root cause of quality and productivity .An effective organisation will always promote a sense of commitment and satisfaction among its employees. The significance and importance of the concept of organizational commitment in terms of leading to beneficial organizational and desirable outcomes such as increased productivity, reducing absenteeism and turnover, has been documented by many studies such as those of Steers (1977); Porter et al. (1974); Reiches (1985) and Tett and Meyer (1993). One way to address issue of employee turnover is to understand the job satisfaction and commitment level of employees. Organizations often try to foster commitment in their employees to achieve stability and reduce costly turnover. It is commonly believed that committed employees will also work harder and be more likely to go the extra mile to achieve organizational objectives. Research has consistently demonstrated that commitment does indeed contribute to a reduction in turnover. Motivated employees are needed in our rapidly changing workplaces. Motivated employees help organizations survive. Motivated employees are more productive. To be effective, managers need to understand what motivates employees within the context of the roles they perform. A lot of studies are conducted separately on commitment, satisfaction and motivation but very few studies are there on IT sector linking these three .So it is crucial to conduct a study on job satisfaction and organizational commitment in information technology industry and also to identify the important motivating factors to retain the highly talented workforce. The review of related literature on Organizational commitment, Job satisfaction and Motivation has helped the researcher to identify the gap and has provided an insight to the direction of current study. The population for the study was all technical employees in the Information technology Industry in Bangalore city. For the present study data was collected with the help of structured questionnaire from 300 employees working in software industry. The study is concentrated on Bangalore IT industry. The researcher used non probabilistic sampling (purposive sampling) method as sampling design. Samples were selected from 10 top IT multinational companies. Samples were drawn from three levels of management including entry level, middle level and top level employees. The pertinent information for the study is collected from both primary and secondary sources. The independent variable in this study is job satisfaction. The overall Job satisfaction was measured using the 15-item questionnaire developed by Prof.Harold Andrew Patrick in 2009, designed to measure 15 aspects of job. The aspects of overall job satisfaction are job security,interest,opportunity for advancement,appreciation,company policy and management practises, intrinsic aspects of a job,salary,supervision,social aspects of job, working conditions,communication,hours,ease, benefits ,and fair treatment. Responses were collected with the help of 7 point likert scale. The dependant variable, organizational commitment was measured using the revised Organizational Commitment Scales (Meyer, Allen and Smith 1993) that is, the Affective Commitment Scale (ACS), the Continuance Commitment Scale (CCS) and the Normative Commitment Scale (NCS) with 24 questions on 7-point Likert scales. The Kovach ten job- related factors developed by kovach , Kenneth (1999) were used to determine what motivates the employees in software industry. The respondents were asked to indicate the degree of importance of the factors and relative ranking according to motivational importance. The statistical technique used to analyse the data were descriptive statistics, The Pearsons correlation, ANOVA, Regression and Friedman test. Data was analysed with the help of SPSS. The major findings of the study were: 1. The level of organizational commitment was moderate, with relatively higher variability in affective commitment. Mean value was highest for Continuance commitment indicating employees are staying back with the organization because of the cost of leaving the organisation or its too much trouble to go somewhere else. 2. IT employees were showing only a moderate level of job satisfaction. Amongst the items comprising the scale for job satisfaction, the items with highest satisfaction levels were related to the social aspects of the job, working conditions (excluding working hours), interest (from intrinsic aspects of the job), job security, communication, and ease of the job (as an intrinsic aspect of the job). On the other hand, employees had lowest satisfaction levels for working hours, supervision, appreciation from management, and salary. It shows that IT employees are dissatisfied with the working hours, supervision, appreciation from management and the salary they are getting. 3. To increase the Job satisfaction and commitment it is very important to identify the motivational factors. . The most important motivational factors for IT employees were good wages, promotion/growth, job security, interesting work, and appreciation of work. 4. There was significant positive correlation of job satisfaction with affective commitment and normative commitment, and negative correlation with continuance commitment. This indicates that higher the level of job satisfaction greater the level of affective commitment and normative commitment. If employees are staying back with the organization because of the cost of leaving the organisation or its too much trouble to go somewhere else then there will be less satisfaction. 5. Amongst the items comprising the scale for job satisfaction, the items with highest correlation with affective commitment were related to the salary, benefits, fair treatment, opportunity for advancement, and supervision. The items with moderate correlation were appreciation (from management),interest (from intrinsic aspects of job),job security and intrinsic aspects of job(excluding ease).The job satisfaction items with lowest correlation were working conditions(excluding hours),social aspects of job, and communication. So it clearly indicates the importance of salary, benefit, fair treatment, opportunity for advancement and a good supervision in increasing the positive emotional attachment to the organisation. 6. Regression analysis revealed that job satisfaction had a significant impact on Organizational commitment. Job satisfaction was found to have a significant positive impact on affective commitment, explaining 67.0% of the variation in affective commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, affective commitment would tend to increase with it. Job satisfaction was not found to have a significant impact on continuance commitment, explaining only 1.2% of the variation in continuance commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, continuance commitment would be expected to slightly decrease with it. Job satisfaction was found to have a significant positive impact on normative commitment, explaining 35.1% of the variation in normative commitment. Thus, when job satisfaction increases, normative commitment would tend to increase with it, but less so than affective commitment. It is the interest of all organization to secure commitment and reduce employee turnover. So this topic has attracted the interest of many researchers. This study confirms the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. So managers need to make effort to develop human resource policies that are in alignment to the needs and motivation of the employees. The findings of this study have pointed out some salient issues in the IT field. It is imperative for IT company management to meet the demands of their personnel to strengthen their motivation, satisfaction, and commitment to minimize turnover.

Sonia Jasmine

Management