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THE IMPACT OF AGE ON EMPLOYEES COMMITMENT IN RELIANCE
COMMUNICATION LTD.
Dr. Sangeeta Malik
Abstract
Organisational commitment is the bond employees experience with their organisation. Broadly speaking, employees who are committed are generally connected with their organisation, feel that they fit in and, understand the goals of the organisation. The added value of such employees is that they tend to be more determined in their work, show relatively high productivity and are more proactive in offering their support.
Purpose: The business organizations are aware of the importance of employee commitment and its role in motivating employees. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of Age on Employees’
Commitment in Reliance telecommunications.
This paper is based on a review of the academic research papers and survey. The primary data has been collected through questionnaires. The secondary data is being used for identifying the commitment related problems of Reliance communication Ltd. The three components of commitments have been taken as independent variables and Age as the dependent variable.The results of the study indicate that the Employees Commitment (Affective, Normative, continuous) are significantly related to employees Age. The research findings reveal that there exists positive relationship between the three commitments- affective, continuance and normative commitment and Age of the employee in the organization. A high degree of correlation observed between independent and dependent variables.
These outcomes in turn are associated with guiding the top management for working towards increasing commitment level. Finding indicates that people with increasing age & experience are more tend to be committed .Aged people are more experience and they have strong bonding to their organisation .This paper would be of value to researchers seeking information on how commitment and age are linked. The data were analyzed using various statistical techniques: SPSS, ANOVA, regression, and correlation analysis.
Keywords : Affective commitment, Normative commitment, Continuance commitment, Age.
INTRODUCTION
Experts define commitment as both a willingness to persist in a course of action and reluctance to change plans, often owing to a sense of obligation to stay the course. People are simultaneously committed to multiple entities, such as economic, educational, familial, political and religious institutions. They also commit themselves to specific individuals, including their spouses, children, parents and siblings, as well as to their employers, co-workers, supervisors and customers.
Commitment manifests itself in distinct behaviour. For example, people devote time and energy to fulfil their on-the-job responsibilities as well as their family, personal, community and spiritual obligations. Commitment also has an emotional component: People usually experience and express positive feelings toward an entity or individual to whom they have made a commitment. Finally,
42 | P a g e commitment has a rational element: Most people consciously decide to make commitments, then they
thoughtfully plan and carry out the actions required to fulfil them. Because commitments require an investment of time as well as mental and emotional energy, most people make them with the expectation of reciprocation. That is, people assume that in exchange for their commitment, they will get something of value in return—such as favours, affection, gifts, attention, goods, money and property.
In the world of work, employees and employers have traditionally made a tacit agreement: In exchange for workers‘ commitment, organizations would provide forms of value for employees, such as secure jobs and fair compensation. Reciprocity affects the intensity of a commitment. When an entity or individual to whom someone has made a commitment fails to come through with the expected exchange, the commitment erodes. Dramatic changes in the global economy over the past 25 years have had significant implications for commitment and reciprocity between employers and employees—and thus for employee engagement. Although restructuring helps organizations compete, these changes have broken the traditional psychological employment ―contract‖ and its expectations of reciprocity. Employees have realized that they can no longer count on working for a single employer long enough to retire. And with reduced expectations of reciprocity, workers have felt less commitment to their employers. Many companies, having broken both formal and psychological employment agreements, are struggling to craft effective strategies for reviving employees‘ commitment and thereby revitalizing their engagement.
Literature review
A large numbers of studies have been conducted to investigate the concept of organizational commitment (OC). Still, commitment is the most challenging and researchable concept in the fields of management, organizational behavior. The concept of organizational commitment has attracted considerable interest in an attempt to understand and clarify the intensity and stability of an employee‘s dedication to the organization. Early studies have shown the concept as a single dimension on the basis of loyalty, involvement and attitudinal identification (ASHFORTH et al., 2008).Organization commitment refers to the employee‘s emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization. Measuring organizational commitment is an assessment of the congruence between an individual‘s own and values and beliefs and those of the organizations ( Swailes,2002).
A considerable amount of review of literature shows very little work conducted in the field of management with respect to age. Lok & Crawford(2001), demographics variables such as age (Mathieu and Zajac,1990;Michel,1994; William and Hazer,1986) ,position (Gregersen and Black, 1992; Mathieu and Zajac,1990) and organization tenure( Mathieu and Hamel,1989 ;Mathieu an Zajac,1990) have been found to be positively related with the organization commitment. According to Mowday et al (1982) there are two perspectives of organizational commitment that dominate the literature. The two perspectives are (1) behavioural perspective and (2) attitudinal perspective .The Attitudinal commitment(Mathieu an Zajac,1990) sees commitment as an attitude reflecting the nature and quality of the linkage between an employee and organization. The behavioural approach is concerned mainly with the process by which individuals develop a sense of attachment not to an organization but to their own actions. Affective , continuance and normative commitment are used to capture the multidimensional nature of organizational commitment (Allen & Meyer ,1997). An investigation of relationship between these three revealed that the affective commitment is highly
43 | P a g e correlated with all the other type of commitment (Cohen ,1993). Also the employees with strong
affective commitment would be motivated for higher level of work performance and make more meaningful contribution than the employees who expressed continuance or normative commitment (Mayer & Allen,1997,Kirchmeyer,1995).Demographic variables are many and some may play an important role in determining an employee‘s commitment(Kirchmeyer, 1995) or job satisfaction (chow,1995).In general research has yielded ambiguous results ,with some studies indicating that demographics may have little or no effect( shadur et al,1995) and other research indicating that demographic variables as age(Mathieu & Zajac,1990), length of service in a particular organization(Luthans, McCaul &Dodd,1985) and marital status(John &Taylor,1999) are either significantly related to or are strong predicators of commitment .
In today‘s business are highly competitive, business firms heavily rely on its human capital to have a competitive edge over others by being able to respond, adapt or change to keep pace with rapid technological advancements, workforce diversity, organizational restructuring and the new ways for doing business and for that the maintaining organizational commitment is a major issue.
In the last few years the telecom industries in India (particularly in Delhi) have been experiencing changes in terms of increased competition, greater client demands and attrition problems. There are many research studies confirming the significance of age on organisational commitment of an employee in the western context. There are a very few studies in the Indian context. Therefore an attempt has been made to examine the impact of age on organisation commitment in Indian scenario, particularly in telecom sector
.
Research Methodology Hypothesis
Ho: No correlation between age and commitment Ho: Age has no significant effect on commitment
Methods
A questionnaire of Meyer and Allen‘s (1991) for commitment was used for this purpose. They developed a three- component model of OC which has been the dominant framework for OC . The questionnaire was divided into four sections to study the characteristics of the important variables.
Section of the questionnaire comprised of demographical background of the respondents. It consist of gender, age, marital status ,education level and length of service in the organisation .Section B, C ,D of the questionnaire are part of the instrument that were aimed to test the variable constructs. This three-component model is based on a more comprehensive understanding of OC. The three- component model consists of: (a) Affective commitment (AC) is the emotional attachment to one‘s organization. (b) Continuance commitment (CC) is the attachment based on the accumulation of valued side bets (pension, skill transferability, relocation, and self-investment) that co-vary with organizational membership. (c) Normative commitment (NC) is the attachment that is based on motivation to conform to social norms regarding attachment. The aim of this paper is to identify the impact of OC (which comprises of AC, CC and NC) of the employees on Age of the Reliance Communication Ltd. The questionnaire was distributed at work places and the responses of
44 | P a g e employees were collected.A quantitative approach was employed in data collection, using a 20-item,
five point Likert scaled questionnaire administered to a sample of 100 employees, with a age range(20-60) were taken for the study. Convenient sampling was resorted here. Research design proposed for the study is ‗Descriptive‘ type. The research study is based on the data interpreted from the questionnaire of the samples. Their feed back as the response of the questionnaire were quantified.
The row data computed in spss.
Result Analysis
From table 1,the highest mean score is 23.79 and standard deviation 5.481 for Affective commitment and 21.26 &21.27for
Normative and continuance commitment, the standard deviation is 4.029 and 4.045respectivly.The lowest mean score for
Age is 2.04 and .920 is the standard deviation.
45 | P a g e From the correlation table-2,The variables of commitment (Affective, normative &continuance
commitment) are not very strongly correlate with DV (Age).The correlation .258 for affective,.112 for normative and .241 for continuance commitment. The inter-correlation among the factors of IVs is also not very strong. The correlation between AC &NC is .320, correlation between AC&CC is .359, between CC &AC is .307, which depicts a moderate correlation. There is a significant relationship found between these three components (p<.05).Thereby the Ho is rejected Hi is accepted, which says that the moderate correlation exist between age
and commitment .It has also been observed the low correlation among the three components of commitment.
In table-3(Model Summary)The R is .303 for the predictors(IV),The r2 calculated is .092, which means 92% variability accounted ,the adjusted R2 is .064, which is lower than the
46 | P a g e R2,because sample size is accounted when we calculate adjusted R2.In regression, there is an
adjustment need to be made to the R2 value for the accurate presentation to the
percentage variance accounted for. The standard error is positive and associated with R2, not adjusted R2.
In ANOVA table-4, testing the statistical significance of the model, the f=3.240, with df3,96 is .025 (p<.05) is statistically significant. Which Proves the hypothesis that age and commitment
have significant relationship.
In coefficient table-5, there is not much difference between unstandardized beta and standardized beta, the standard error are almost similar. The standardized beta predicts the unique contribution of each variable as predictor of DV we can say that AC &CC are contributing to the regression equation, there is a much lower negative contribution of NC than the other variable, AC &CC,
the betas are not statistically significant except CC. This is because the sample is not very big and fluctuations are bound to take place. The affective commitment is .068, which is P<.05, is considered to a
47 | P a g e significant contributor in commitment with age. The significance level of continuance commitment is
.111 which is again p<.o5 is significant, but normative commitment is not a significant contributor of commitment.
with age.
Conclusion
In the last few years the telecom industries in India (particularly in Delhi) have been experiencing drastically changes in different dimensions. Globalisation has put lot of challenges in the aspiration and commitment of the employees.
On the basis of above mentioned study, we can conclude that variable age contributor to commitment. It may be due to the fact that people develop workplace lower their expectations to more realistic need and adjust themselves better to their work situations. Commitment is usually stronger among long-term stay employees (Newstrom,2007).REFERENCES
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*Dr.Sangeeta Malik is Professor in Maharaja Agarsen Institute of Management Studies,Rohini, Delhi
